Irish
Foreign Affairs
Volume Six, Number 2
June 2013
“Every nation, if it is to survive as a nation, must study its own history and have a foreign policy”
—C.J. O’Donnell, The Lordship of the World, 1924, p.145
Contents
Editorial - Greece p. 2
JFK Conspiracy Theories Part 4 John Martin p. 8
Conor Cruise O’Brien: Diplomat or Dictator? - A Preview
Pat Muldowney p. 14
Starving the Germans: the Evolution of Britain’s Strategy of Economic Warfare During the
First World War—The French Connection Part 3 Eamon Dyas p. 15
‘Emergency Czechmate’ or Wartime Dialogue?
Dev, the ‘Irish Institute’ and the Masaryk Affair
Manus O’Riordan p. 20
A Dangerous Delusion: Why The West Got It Wrong about Nuclear Iran
Interviews with David Morrison p. 27
Documents
A Pardon for Deserters - Letters p. 30
De Valera’s Reply to Churchill 16 May 1945 p. 31
Speech by Brendan Halligan on Europe p. 33
What If? ­ —The start of WWII — 9/11 p. 34
Irish Soldiers Deployed Abroad Today p. 35
Mali’s Natural Resources p. 36
A Quarterly Review published by the Irish Political Review Group, Dublin
Greece
Editorial
When the attempted coup against the Gorbachev regime
in the Soviet Union failed in August 1991, Problems Of
Communism (a forerunner of this journal) said that an era of
intense nationalism around the world had begun.
Until that moment the world had been an arena of contention
between two incompatible socio-economic systems: Capitalism
and Communism. Direct war between the two systems which
aspired to dominate the world was averted by the fact that since
1948, when the Soviet Union caught up with the United States
in the arms race by making a nuclear bomb, each had the power
to destroy the other. The conflict between the systems was
therefore confined to secondary areas of the world. Only proxy
wars could be fought. The proxy wars were internal conflicts in
Third World countries in which each side had support from one
of the World Powers and something like a ‘level playing field’
was thus established.
When Mikhail Gorbachev brought about the collapse of the
Soviet Union with his simple-minded, starry-eyed, notion of
democracy, universalist capitalism dominated the world, at least
in principle. By the late 1990s it was being stated authoritatively
that the primary function of all Governments was to facilitate
capital investments in their economies from Imperialist centres,
and safeguard those investments.
International Capitalism, Globalism, had arrived. But so
had Nationalism as a phenomenon that popped up everywhere.
Capitalism had fostered Nationalism in its Cold War against
the Soviet Union. But the collapse of the Soviet Union led to a
spontaneous growth of Nationalism everywhere.
Capitalism generates the nationalism which it seeks to
override.
Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Fein, put it this way:
“Between the Individual and Humanity stands, and must
continue to stand, a great fact—the Nation.”
Arnold Toynbee, in his mammoth Study Of History came to
a similar conclusion that industrial capitalism and nationality
ran together.
Capitalism as a pure form of itself, untainted by Imperialism
has never existed. The experience of the past twenty years,
during which it has had free rein in the world, does not suggest
that it is capable of existing. Post-nationalist capitalism as a
world system appears to be a delusion.
If it was possible, the place where it might have been realised
is the Northern half of the American continent. It was an ‘empty’
space, colonised in the first instance by English democrats,
fleeing from the feudal/monarchical elements of English life.
They took the free market with them across the Atlantic. They
asserted their independence from the Mother Country which
had hatched them. And the world was their oyster—or at least
the ‘empty’ half of an immense Continent was.
The fact that the half-Continent was not literally empty
is beside the point. It was empty in principle. Jefferson, as
President, made an authoritative statement that US sovereignty
stretched to the Pacific when in fact it had not yet got half-way
there, and he gave the actual inhabitants fair warning that they
would probably be exterminated, actually using that word. The
2
USA spread westwards, clearing the ground of all obstacles as
it went, and treating the humans who were in the way as wild
beasts.
David Bailie Warden, a young, idealistic, Presbyterian
clergyman, escaped persecution as a United Irishman by fleeing
to America. He became a good American citizen, dedicated
to Progress. In 1819 he published a History Of The United
States. He recorded the shameful fact of slavery in the southern
states. But the ongoing genocide he saw as a progressive work
of clearing the wilderness.
The genocide was not completed until the end of the 19th
century. A soldier who took part in one of its final episodes was
an officer with the American Army in Europe in 1917. When,
after winning the World War for Britain, the USA sat back and
reviewed its situation in the 1920s, a number of books were
issued by mainstream publishers which contrasted the clean,
hygienic and eugenic, mode of Protestant colonisation in North
America with the messy Spanish intervention in the South
where, under the influence of reactionary Catholic dogma, the
superior European stock sank into the inferior native stock
through intermarriage.
And, during World War 2, while Himmler was handling the
Jewish problem in the way he thought was right, Hollywood
produced a Western in which John Wayne saw off a horde of
natives, and a good citizen commended him with the words:
“We need more men like you to exterminate these savages”.
So let’s admit the power of the Puritan conscience and
see the North American Continent as an empty space for the
development of capitalism free of all pre-capitalist influences.
In causative terms the exterminations were without effect on
capitalist development. There were no compromises—no
appeasements. If there was ever a place where a pure form
of Capitalism might settle down in contentment, it was North
America.
But what did the US do when it reached the Pacific? It
crossed the ocean and compelled Japan, which had been living
peacefully within itself for a couple of centuries, to open itself
to international market relations. And then, little more than a
generation later, it concluded that war with Japan would soon
be inevitable—because Japan had become capitalist.
Why could the United States not settle down in the immense
space which it had cleared of ‘inferior’ peoples for itself? The
ideology of Aryan supremacism possibly had something to do
with it. But it seems likely that this ideology survived, after
the domestic genocides had been completed, because it fitted
in with the expansionist dynamic that is intrinsic to capitalism,
and that must express itself unless it is subjected to strong social
and political constraints.
Capitalism is a British invention. Elements of it can be
found in many places, but the combination of the elements
into a system came about in England after a century and a half
of spurious religious ‘Reformation’, Revolution and CounterRevolution had shredded the traditional society and had
destroyed Monarchy without establishing popular government.
In Germany the Reformation was a development within
German culture. In England it was a destructive force.
Puritanism triumphant might possibly have established a
settled state and society operating by Mosaic law. Cromwell
prevented that development. He saved the Common Law,
which by that time meant whatever the upstart gentry wanted it
to mean. Thereafter the Puritans were excluded from political
office but were given their head in society by a ruling class
of upstart gentry which had became a progressive aristocracy
subject to nothing but itself and which had conceived the
ambition of world domination. It was through that combination
of wild Puritanism and aristocratic Imperialism that capitalism
as a freely operating system came about in England and it was
through the same combination that it was expanded into a
world system by the Puritan colonisation of North America and
the Slave Trade, of which England gained a virtual monopoly
in 1712.
But, despite the vast contribution made by the Slave Trade
and Slavery to English power, England was no more likely to
become a slave society than was the Soviet Union. Forced labour
in the Soviet camps was an adjunct to socialist development,
contributing to primary accumulation, as England’s great
slave labour camps in the Caribbean contributed to primary
accumulation for capitalism. When industrial slavery in the
Caribbean had served the purpose of fuelling the take-off
of capitalism, a “moral sense” arose which found slavery
abhorrent to Christian principles.
This “moral sense” did nothing reckless, however. Slavery
was phased out gradually in the interest of industrial capitalism
based on wage labour. England stopped its own Slave Trade
in 1808, and set about stopping everybody else’s too. But it
kept up its Slave Labour Camps for a further thirty years. And,
when it abolished slavery as an offence against Christianity, it
was not the slaves that it compensated but the slave-owners,
whose property it was abolishing. Thus, in the very act of
abolishing slavery in a loudly-proclaimed spirit of humanity, it
recognised that the slaves had been the legitimate property of
their owners.
Dr. Johnson, a Tory reactionary, did not acknowledge the
legitimacy of slavery and the invaluable contribution it was
making to the consolidation of the capitalist money system.
Whenever there was news of a Slave Rebellion in the Caribbean,
he toasted it and wished it well. That was the great weakness
in his character. His right-thinking associate and biographer,
Boswell, was always trying to put him right about it.
This is not irony. It is history.
Irish Foreign Affairs is a publication of
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3
Capitalism would not have flourished as well as it did
without the help of Genocide and Slavery. They were helpfully
incidental to it.
English Imperialism carried capitalism around the world, but
it did so within the formal trappings of Empire. The USA in the
1940s had to save England in a World War which it had started
but was unable to win. But, by the time the Second Front was
launched in 1944, what England needed to be saved from was
not the enemy but an ally.
Fascism had saved capitalist civilisation from Communism
in Central Europe in the chaos that resulted from the destructive
Versailles Peace. Winston Churchill frankly acknowledged that
to be the case.
The situation in 1944 was that Britain had again made a mess
of a World War. It had collaborated with Hitler to build up the
power of Germany from 1933 to 1938. Then it declared war on
Germany in 1939 on the indefensible issue of Danzig. It gave a
military guarantee to Poland which it dishonoured. It declared
war on Germany with the intention of getting France to fight it.
After the defeat in France in June 1940, it kept the war going by
means of its naval dominance with the object of spreading it to
neutral countries. The United States refused appeals to come
and save it in 1940 and 1941. In June 1941 the British policy
of spreading the war met with major success in the form of
the German invasion of the Soviet Union. President Roosevelt
provoked Japan into war. Hitler supported Japan by declaring
war on the USA. The USA wanted to get going with war in
Europe as soon as possible, but Churchill delayed from year
to year—no doubt waiting to see how the Soviet/German War
would resolve itself. By the Summer of 1944, the Soviets had
not only stopped the German advance, but had begun gutting
the German Armies, and were pressing westwards hard.
Britain had bungled its handling of the world, as its Superpower
between 1919 and 1939, so badly that its fundamental enemy
(the Soviet Union) was poised to emerge from the war of the
Empire against its secondary enemy (Germany, restored as a
major Power) in dominance in Central Europe.
The Second Front of June 1944 did not have the object of
preventing Germany from winning. Germany was no longer in
a position to win by that time. The function of the Second Front
was to prevent the Soviet Union, which had already made the
defeat of Germany certain, from liberating too much of Europe
from Nazism.
Churchill had said before the War, and he repeated it after
the War, that, if it came to fundamentals, the Soviet Union was
the enemy.
What the US did in 1944-45 was gain a base area in Western
Europe against the fundamental enemy, who was an accidental,
and all too effective, Ally.
The intermediary force between the two systems, Fascism,
was cleared away. In the American view the British Empire,
which took itself to be a directing force in world affairs, was
another intermediary force. Its purpose from the moment it
entered the War was to get rid of the swaddling clothes of
Empire and set capitalism free.
Thus the two world systems came face to face in 1945. It
then took 45 years for one of them to collapse and for capitalism
to come into its own.
During this period the remaining formal Empires from the
pre-1914 era were dismantled.
The Tsarist Empire had dissolved of its own accord, in 1917,
under stress of the expansionist war in Europe, to which Britain
had diverted it from its more natural expansion in Asia.
Britain, supported by France, had broken up the Hapsburg
and Ottoman Empires into nation states in 1919.
It was not under pressure of national rebellions (such
as occurred against the British Empire in Ireland) that the
Hapsburg Empire was broken up. The peoples of the Hapsburg
Empire were loyal to it in a way that the Irish were not loyal
to Britain. But Britain denied independence to the Irish, who
had been nationally-organised against it, while it set up peoples
(mixtures of peoples) with little or no prior national organisation,
as independent nation-states in Eastern Europe.
And it actively propagandised the welter of peoples in the
Middle East with a kind of racial or religious hostility to Turkey
which it called national in order to raise an army to fight the
Turks. It then, in collaboration with France, suppressed the
general Arab state which the leaders of the Arab Revolt tried to
establish in 1919. And it set up a series of spurious nation-states,
with no internal national coherence, to suit its own purposes
and that of France. The shaping of the diverse peoples of these
areas to the nation-states set up by Anglo-French Imperialism
required forceful national action by the internal rulers of
those states—which could be denounced as Tyranny when the
Imperialist creators felt that the creations were becoming too
independent.
The Jewish problem in its modern form was generated by the
destruction of those two Empires.
The Jews were the middle class of the Hapsburg Empire.
They had their recognised place in it.
The Empire was broken up into a series of nation-states
with inadequately-developed middle classes. The formation
of those states was not the culminating act of a long national
development. Nationalism was instigated by the formation
of those nation-states. The Jews, as the people of the Empire,
could not act as the national middle classes. The native middle
classes had to fill themselves out and displace the Imperial
Jews. Therefore anti-Semitism was endemic as a medium of
social development in the new East European states.
In its Middle Eastern policy Britain adopted the Zionist
movement as a counter to the Arab nationalism which it had
fostered. It made Zionism a force in world affairs. The Irish,
who had elected an independent Government, were locked
out of the Versailles Conference while the Jewish nationalist
movement, which claimed national rights in Palestine despite
having been absent from it for two thousand years, was present
at the Conference. Jewish colonisation in Palestine was fostered
by Britain until it was strong enough to assert its independence
and set up in the business of conquest for itself.
The destructive arrangements made by the British Empire
after the German collapse of late 1918 generated the forces on
which Britain made war in 1939. Its second World War brought
Communism to Eastern Europe and East Germany, where it
faced the United States in West Germany.
The French Resistance to Nazism came to power in 1944,
reasserted the Imperial rights of France, and fought dirty wars
in Indochina and Algeria in defence of them. The British
Empire fought dirty wars against the Malayan Anti-Fascists and
against Kenyans who opposed the continuing process of white
colonisation. But neither Empire was formally sustainable. By
the time capitalism, driven by the United States, staked its claim
to universality, and sole legitimacy, in 1990, no more than a few
fragments of formal Imperialism remained.
4
This new, universal, capitalism asserted universal right
without responsibility. The formal Empires had at least pretended
to assume responsibility for dealing with the consequences of
their destructive activities. They did not assume that capitalism
was an arrangement of things that arose naturally from human
nature, and that where it did not work well the reason must be
the influence of tyrants, or socialists, or other evildoers.
A century ago, when there was still a substantial pre-capitalist
section in the world, a Marxist explanation of Imperialism
was the capitalist need to create new markets in order to make
expanded reproduction of capital possible.
Each capitalist is in competition with every other capitalist.
The purpose of each is to make a profit. The profit must then
be invested with the object of making further profit. And so it
continues on an ever-increasing scale. Within the terms of the
dynamic of capitalism there is no resting point. The market
must expand continuously so that capitalism can continue. As
the home market approaches saturation point, a catastrophic
slump is warded off by Imperialism, which turns pre-capitalist
societies into markets for capitalist goods. Capitalism thus
becomes international. That was Rosa Luxemburg’s view
before the Great War.
When Britain launched the World War in 1914 it had arranged
for Germany to be isolated from the world. The Royal Navy
immediately cut it off from its sea-borne trade. France was at
war with it in the West, Russia in the East, and neutral Italy, a
German Ally, was brought into the War against it with an offer
that it might seize Austrian territory. Nevertheless the German
economy did not collapse. Direction by the State, combined
with industrial ingenuity kept it going. This led to a new idea
of Imperialism being formed by Russian Marxists. Imperialism
was organised capitalism. Money, the most volatile element
of capitalism, was meshed with industry and State direction
to meet the requirements of war production. The combination
was called Finance Capitalism, and it was seen as a phase in the
transition from Capitalism to Socialism. Bukharin, the theorist
of the Bolshevik Party, published a book called Imperialism
And World Economy. And Lenin, the politician, wrote an
Introduction to it.
In the mid-1970s there was a muffled argument about
Imperialism in Belfast. A group—which adopted the philosophy
of Louis Althusser as a perfected form of Marxism-Leninism,
and set out to establish a true Marxist theory of the state in
Ireland and of the Irish relationship with Britain—disagreed
with the old-fashioned, unscientific way the word Imperialism
was being used by the Republicans who were fighting the
War. They belonged to a rival Republican tendency, which had
adopted Marxism, and which desisted from war-making after a
couple of years. Their Marxist conceptions under which they
made war did not correspond with the reality in which they
acted and this led to their actions becoming grotesque.
The rigorously scientific Althusserian Marxist-Leninists—
one of whom is now a Professor and the other a member of
the House of Lords—joined forces with those Republicans—
Official, not Provisional—and set about elaborating a theory of
the “Northern Ireland state”. In the course of this they made
use of the Bukharin/Lenin concept Imperialism as integral
Finance Capitalism in criticism of the Provisional Republicans.
But there was no such entity as the Northern Ireland state.
Northern Ireland was only a region of the British state. And
neither was there a Bukharin/Lenin theory of Imperialism.
Bukharin had the habit of creating tight systems of thought
which took off at a tangent from reality and soon lost contact
with it. Lenin was a politician for whom theory was a means
of keeping tabs on reality. In his head, therefore, theory never
became systematic. His favourite Goethe quotation was,
“Theory is grey my friend, but the eternal tree of life is green”.
When, after the Revolution, it was necessary to draw up a
new programme, he refused to have Bukharin’s tight definition
of Imperialism.
“Comrade Bukharin did not quite correctly explain the reason
the majority of the commission rejected all attempts to draw
up the programme in such a way that everything relating to
the old capitalism would be deleted. The majority rejected
those attempts because they would be wrong. They would not
correspond to the real state of affairs. Pure imperialism, without
the fundamental basis of capitalism, has never existed, does
not exist anywhere, and never will exist. This is an incorrect
generalisation of everything that was said of the syndicates,
cartels, trusts and finance capitalism, when finance capitalism
was depicted as though it had none of the foundations of the old
capitalism under it…
“When Comrade Bukharin stated that an attempt might be
made to present an integral picture of the collapse of capitalism
and imperialism we objected to it… Just try it and you will see
that you will not succeed… Comrade Bukharin made one such
an attempt… and himself gave it up. I am convinced that if
anybody could do this it is Comrade Bukharin… We in Russia
are now experiencing the consequences of the imperialist war
and the beginning of the dictatorship of the proletariat. At the
same time in a number of regions of Russia, cut off from each
other more than formerly, we frequently see a regeneration
of capitalism and the development of its early stage… If the
programme were to be written in the way Comrade Bukharin
wanted, it would be… a reproduction of all that is best that has
been said of finance capitalism and imperialism, but it would
not reproduce reality, precisely because reality is not integral.
A programme made up of heterogenous parts is inelegant… but
any other programme would simply be incorrect…
“We are living at a time when a number of the most elementary
and fundamental manifestations of Capitalism have been
revived.
“To escape from this sad reality by creating a smooth and
integral programme is to escape into something ethereal, that is
not of this world. And it is by no means reverence for the past,
as Comrade Bukharin politely hinted, which induced us here
to insert passages from the old programme… The capitalism
described in 1903 remains in existence in 1919…
“Nowhere in the world has monopoly capitalism existed in
a whole series of branches without free competition, nor will
it exist… To maintain that there is such a thing as integral
imperialism without the old capitalism is simply making the
wish father to the thought… Imperialism is a superstructure
on capitalism… In reality there exists a vast subsoil of the old
capitalism…” (March 1919, Report On Party Programme).
Excessively systematic theorising of a particular phase
of capitalist development in a particular place led to a denial
of the possibility of effective nationalism. Lenin’s untidy
conception became a major influence on Third World national
developments.
After seventy years the Leninist development ran out of
steam in Russia. Its weakness was that it did not provide a
diffuse medium of thought for society at large. It has often
been criticised for being a kind of religion, but a religion is
what it was not; that is why it atrophied.
Lenin was greatly influenced by Chernyshevsky’s What Is To
Be Done? Dostoevsky, who had been a revolutionary, recoiled
from Chernyshevsky’s rationalist vision of life and became a
reactionary obscurantist. Lenin made something powerful
out of Chernyshevsky combined with Marx. Its power is still
operative in parts of the world, but in its home base it was given
the coup de grâce by Dostoevsky, in the form of Solzhenitsyn.
The Leninist system, while it lasted as a major state power,
exerted a constraining influence on Capitalism. When it
collapsed, Capitalism found itself alone in the world. How does
Capitalism function when the whole world is capitalist—where
there is no enemy system in being, and no large region lying
outside the market?
The argument against nationalism a century ago was not so
much that it was wrong, as that it had become impossible since
Capitalism, through its Imperialist development, had become
an international system. Those who adopt an ideological
stance against nationalism on moral grounds might argue that it
continued to be an active force during the past century because
the international capitalism of Euro/American Imperialism was
only a superficial crust in much of the world and that capitalism
still remained to be generated at the base of many societies.
And, since that has now been accomplished, the era of Postnationalism has now arrived in earnest and that henceforward
nationalism can be no more than a kind of wayward, voluntaristic
evil.
John Lloyd, Financial Times journalist, and former member
of the former Communist Party of Great Britain, wept tears
of repentance over his participation in Stalin’s crimes—it
must have been a vicarious, imaginary participation. He
exulted in the Financial Times when Boris Yeltsin shelled the
Russian Parliament (which harboured nationalists), ruled as a
Presidential democrat, and threw the Russian economy open to
strong centres of Western capitalism. He then preached war on
Iraq in Irish publications in 2003, and weeps no tears over his
responsibility (actual, not vicarious) for the present condition
of Iraq. Why should he? Iraq is now a democracy within the
approved international order of the world. It is no longer a
representative dictatorship tending to the national interests of
Iraq, so what else could it be but a democracy?
And Lloyd is an apostle of Post-nationalism. (See Irish
Examiner, 1st February.)
These positions are mutually coherent. But they do not
correspond with the reality of things now, any more than was
the case a century ago.
Democracy and Nationality were conceived together in
the French Revolution and they remain incapable of viable
existence apart from each other. And the nation, as Stalin
explained in the classic work on the question, is a social form
intimately connected with Capitalism.
Capitalism may exist everywhere. It may be springing up
from the base everywhere, as well as being imposed from the
top. But it is not international in any other sense. It exists
in national blocs which are in rivalry with each other and are
committed to developing at each other’s expense. The necessity
of expanded reproduction of invested capital is ineradicable
from the system. And the fact that the pre-capitalist world has
gone only means that each capitalist country seeks to expand at
the expense of the others. World capitalism is not a harmonious
system capable of being run by a world democracy.
The European Union, constructed in the aftermath of World
War 2 under the auspices of Christian Democracy of Germany
supported by that of Italy and by Gaullism in France, aimed to
establish a “social market”—an organised market subject to
control by a pervasive culture. It achieved considerable success
during the Cold War between Communism and Capitalism.
When the Cold War ended the European system was disrupted,
5
chiefly by Britain, which had been incautiously admitted to
it. Christian Democracy was found to be a form of corruption.
There was random expansion, fuelled by the delusion of world
domination.
The original Europe of the 1950s, the Europe of The Six,
was supra-national in its leadership. It was European because
of its common experience of the Second World War and of
the preceding inter-War period under British dominance. It
was committed to an integral development of Europe which
would make it invulnerable to British “balance-of-power”
manipulation. That development continued for a while after
the first tranche of new members was admitted in 1972. Britain
was admitted, along with Ireland, in that tranche. It was
admitted because the Prime Minister of the time, Edward Heath,
appeared to have committed Britain to a future as a European
state. But Heath’s Government fell within a couple of years.
The Labour Party was very doubtful indeed about a
European future for Britain. It was a Labour Minister who
expressed sadness at the prospect of England’s thousand-years
of independent glory petering out in European banality.
Margaret Thatcher replaced Heath as Tory leader and the
subversion of Europe began. Balance-of-power policy towards
Europe—Churchill described it as “the wonderful unconscious
instinct” of the British people—was back on the agenda.
Ireland was admitted to Europe as one of a pair with Britain.
It benefited greatly from the supra-national conduct of the
EU, but it was itself a source of weakness to Europe. It had
lost the sense of itself by crumbling morally in a diplomatic
confrontation with Britain over Northern Ireland in 1970. It
tried to escape from itself into Europe. And, though its
particular interests were the opposite of British interests with
regard to Europe, it was often a second voice for Britain in the
‘high politics’ of the situation. And on the Irish ‘Left’ an antiEuropean “Irish Sovereignty Movement” was launched, which
largely echoed British anti-Europeanism.
The British purpose was to reduce the European project to a
free market for itself, while exempting itself as far as possible
from everything else. Its relentless pressure, given opportunity
by the ending of the Cold War, ended the supra-national
conduct of the Community and replaced it with internationalism
which, in this instance at least, works out as a competition of
nationalisms. And this required the participants to have a
degree of realistic national will.
It appears that Ireland has re-discovered itself to an extent
in the course of the banking crisis, and has freed itself from its
escapist attitude to Europe.
Greece, evidently, has not.
It settled accounts with Germany over the 2nd World War a
generation ago. It was a full and final settlement. Now there
is a movement which wants to re-open the matter and demand
more compensation.
Greece did well out of the EU but neglected to tend to its
own affairs while doing so. When the bank crisis hit, it found
itself in a hopeless position. The EU, from which it had gained
so much, seemed to be on the verge of crumbling. Every few
weeks the British media reported its imminent collapse. All
that was sound in it was Germany. The EU therefore became
the Fourth Reich. (For British commentators in the sixties it
was the Holy Roman Empire revived.)
Greece has been very much the plaything of European power
politics for much of its modern existence.
6
At the start of Britain’s two World Wars of the 20th century, it
had competent Governments which saw where its interests lay,
but Britain got the better of both of them. In 1914 Britain offered
it a big piece of Turkey, if it would declare war on Turkey. King
Constantine, supported by his Chief of Staff, General Metaxas,
refused. Greece had recently doubled its size in the Balkan War
and needed time for digestion. Britain invaded, overthrew the
Government, and installed its own Government with Venezelos
as puppet. Turkey was defeated and Constantinople was under
British occupation. Lloyd George urged the Greeks to go and
take Anatolia. They did so, with wholesale atrocities which
should be put in the balance of any humanitarian accounting.
But the Greeks were cleared out of Asia Minor, where they had
lived in peace for centuries under Turkish rule, by an unexpected
Turkish resistance.
Twenty years later General Metaxas was in power. Italy
went to war to take possession of territories it felt it had been
promised by Britain in 1915 for joining the war on Germany.
Britain, which had lost the battle in France and was looking
to expand the War, wanted to intervene in support of Greece
against Italy. Metaxas, who was conducting an effective defence
against Italy, refused the pressing British offer of assistance. It
wasn’t needed, and he reasoned that, if he brought Britain into
his War, Hitler would be obliged to come in on the Italian side.
Metaxas died. His weak successor made alliance with
Britain. Germany made alliance with Italy. Greece was
conquered, delaying the attack on Russia by six weeks. A
strong Communist resistance developed in Greece. The preWar ruling circles formed a Government under Nazi hegemony
and fought the class war against the Communists. Nazism was
defeated by Russia. The Nazi collaborators in Greece were
supported by the Western allies in a Civil War.
The Irish Minister for Defence and Justice, Zionist Alan
Shatter, has condemned Irish neutrality in the 2nd World War.
Ireland should have offered itself up to Britain for the fighting
of the War. (It could have done no war-making of its own if it
had declared war on Germany because Britain, in the course of
allowing it to form an independent government, had compelled
it to fight a ‘civil war’ in 1922-23, from which it had never
recovered militarily.)
Greece, freed from Metaxas, who has been denigrated as a
German agent by British propaganda for trying to save Greece
from both of Britain’s World Wars, offered itself up to Britain
with disastrous consequences.
The Second World War, which is a series of wars of very
different kinds, given a spurious unity by British propaganda,
is very much in need of deconstruction. Europe is at a point
where it can only go forward by going back to basics.
Professor W. Alison Phillips of Trinity College, who
published an anti-Irish history of Irish affairs in the early 1920s,
which is now much admired, also published a History of the
Greek War of Independence 1821-33. His Concluding Remarks
run:
“To the constitution of a nation, …more is needed than an
extension of territory or a guarantee of the Powers; and it has
been questioned whether the character of the Greeks is such as
to warrant their being entrusted with any extended dominion.
It is pointed out that, as a nation, they are bankrupt, and, as a
people, though possessing many attractive qualities, factious,
unstable, and dishonest. Yet, though all this may be said of
them, and, indeed, appears only too clearly in the history of
the War of Independence, that war, and the one which has just
been concluded, prove that the Greeks are capable of making
great sacrifices for the sake of a national ideal; and it is possible
that, with a wider field on which to work their conceptions
of duty and patriotism would likewise expand. To maintain
that the Greeks are, as a race, incapable of establishing and
maintaining a powerful State, is to ignore the teaching of a long,
if comparatively neglected, period of history. The Byzantine
Empire was a Greek State; and, hopelessly corrupt as it
doubtless too often proved itself at the centre, it nevertheless
preserved civilisation and the remains of ancient culture for a
thousand years against barbarism which, from the north and
east, threatened to overwhelm them… There never was an age
when Greece was peopled by a race of heroes and philosophers,
or when her counsels were governed by the purest patriotism.
The Athenian crowd which listened to the masterpieces of
Aeschylus or Sophocles was as fickle as the Athenian crowd of
to-day; (The War of Independence, 1897, p403-4).
The barbarism of the North became Germany. German
culture, more than any of the other modern national cultures,
developed itself through absorbing the culture of ancient Greece.
And the immediate future of Europe seems to depend to a great
degree on the ability of Germany to cope with the nihilism with
which Greece has been overcome.

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7
JFK Conspiracy Theories Part 4: The CIA
by John Martin
It is said that the Gods have long ceased to care about the
affairs of men. But Robert Kennedy knew it was not true. We
can occasionally escape the consequences of our actions, but not
always. Sometimes the unseen forces wake from their slumber
and then even the President of the United States must pay.
William Manchester, John F. Kennedy's biographer, recorded
that following the assassination, Jackie Kennedy's 's despair was
deepened when she learned that the chief suspect was a Marxist
(Manchester, page 469). It should not have happened that way.
A liberal President had rode into the hate capital of the South.
A right wing assassin would have confirmed the President as a
martyr to the civil rights cause. That was the meaning that she
wanted and searched for in vain.
But Bobby Kennedy knew that the meaning was all too
clear. He had no illusions. As the events unfolded in the days
following his brother's death not even the errors of the Dallas
Police Force nor the subsequent murder of the assassin could
obscure the truth. He could read it with his eyes closed.
The facts of the assassination are known, but they do not
speak for themselves. They must be infused with meaning.
After Oswald had committed his terrible heroic deed the Gods
had no longer any use for him. He descended to earth from the
sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building and
was left to his own devices. On the streets below he fumbled
for a transport ticket only to discover that the bus returned in
the direction from whence he had came and was jammed in the
traffic that his action had caused. He hailed a taxi. The driver
took the fare, and thought that the dishevelled Oswald looked
like a tramp. There would be no tip!
When Oswald returned to his boarding house, his thoughts
turned to escape. But what was he escaping from? Not from
the police! It was only a matter of time before they were on
his trail. He was the only employee of the Texas School Book
Depository who had fled the scene of his crime. The rifle that
was left at the sixth floor had been posted the previous March to
a P.O. box registered in his name. Oswald had rented a room in
the boarding house under an assumed name, but the FBI knew
where his wife lived and she knew the telephone number of
the boarding house. It was only a matter of time before the net
would close in.
Perhaps his instinct was to avoid waiting passively for
his fate. He wanted to escape his modest abode. His capture
needed to be on neutral territory. Three quarters of an hour
after the assassination Oswald murdered Officer J.D. Tippit..
Was this done to prolong his freedom? Norman Mailer in his
book Oswald’s Tale, thinks the Tippit killing was a mistake
on Oswald’s part. The assassination of a President was in
the realm of history and was beyond normal experience and
understanding. But the people could understand only too well
the murder of a policeman, a husband, father and a working
8
man, who moonlighted as a bouncer to supplement his meagre
income.
Although Oswald’s actions in the aftermath of the
assassination have the quality of a panicked frenzy, he recovered
his sang froid following his arrest. He revelled in the attention
of the world press. It was a stroke of genius for him to deny
his guilt by claiming he was a “patsy”; a word that rightly or
wrongly will always be associated with him. Jack Ruby claimed
that Oswald had a smirk on his face moments before he was
shot.
But the most disturbing aspect of the assassination was
Oswald’s politics. Jackie Kennedy was by no means the only
person who wished that the assassin had been from the political
right. Oswald’s allegiance to Cuba had a significance, which
only Bobby Kennedy and a small circle of people on the highest
echelon of the State could appreciate.
There are many things which can be said about Oswald.
He was egotistical; semi-literate; a wife beater; incapable of
holding down a job; a misanthropist; a social misfit; a fantasist;
and a psychopath. All of those descriptions might be true. But
he was more than that. He saw himself as a man of destiny. In
his diaries he wrote the following:
"what would happen if someone would stand up and say he
was utterly opposed not only to the government, but too (sic)
the entire land and complete foundations of his socially (sic)"
(Manchester, p53).
William Manchester writing in the 1960s may not have
known what Bobby Kennedy knew about the significance of
Oswald’s Cuban allegiance, but he knew enough to know it
was trouble. His book on the assassination is an early example
of an author pretending that Oswald was someone other than
what he was. Although Manchester could be described as an
establishment writer, who is convinced of Oswald’s guilt and
the fact that he acted alone, he is just as guilty as conspiracy
writers of giving a distorted view of the assassin.
Oswald’s politics are dismissed as being incoherent. Instead
he is portrayed as a product of the hate filled environment of
Dallas. Indeed, Manchester compiles an impressive rap sheet
against the city itself: He tells us that in 1963 the State of
Texas had a higher rate of homicide than any other State and
Dallas led Texas. This had nothing to do with the underworld
or outsiders. From January to November 22, the city with a
population 747,000 had 110 murders, which was more than the
whole of England in the same period (Manchester, page 67).
It was also deeply conservative and 97% Protestant. Although
John F. Kennedy had a Texan running mate (Lyndon Johnson)
62.5% voted for Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
Extreme right wing groups such as the Minutemen, the John
Birch Society and the Christian Crusaders had strong support
in the city.
When the liberal Democrat Adlai Stephenson visited the city
in October 1963 he was assaulted.
Two days before the assassination a Rev. J. Sidlow Baxter
told 5,000 delegates of the Baptist General Convention of the
Texas American electorate:
"one of the greatest blunders in its history when it put a Roman
Catholic President in the White House...religious convictions
must outweigh political loyalties. ...vote not Democrat or
Republican, but Protestant".
Manchester tells us the audience rose in acclamation cheering
Amen (Manchester, page 72).
This is not to say that all Dallasites were reactionaries.
Manchester says a minority welcomed the President, but he
refers to them as the “underground”. Following the assassination
a child from a conservative family commiserated with a
member of the “underground” on the death of “your President”.
But was he not “your President” as well came the reply to the
conservative.
Dallas school children in a salubrious suburb cheered when
they heard of Kennedy’s death.
In 1963 Dallas still had difficulty coming to terms with the
outcome of the American Civil War. When Kennedy arrived
he was greeted with Confederate flags. Some placards had the
words “Yankee go home!”
The superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository,
where Oswald worked, is quoted as saying “except for my
niggers the boys are conservative, like me, like most Texans”.
He didn’t like Kennedy because he was a “race mixer”.
A leaflet with a photograph of Kennedy and the caption
“wanted for treason” was distributed in the days before his
arrival. The Dallas Morning News carried an advertisement
with black borders outlining the “crimes” of Kennedy.
.
Manchester notes plaintively that Lee Harvey Oswald pored
over the pages of the Dallas Morning News.
It is true that Oswald read the Dallas Morning News, but
only because it was lying around his workplace. He was an avid
and indiscriminate reader, but it would be ridiculous to suggest
– as Manchester does – that it had any influence on Oswald.
The city of Dallas in 1963 may have been a nasty, mean
spirited place, but it was entirely innocent of the assassination of
Kennedy. Lee Harvey Oswald was completely unrepresentative
of any social force within that city. If he had been typical of
Dallas, he would not have presented such a problem for the
American political class.
Lyndon Johnson may not have known what Bobby Kennedy
did, but he could not fail to appreciate the international
ramifications of Oswald being a Marxist. When he appointed
Judge Earl Warren to chair a commission to investigate the
assassination the truth was the least of his concerns. Here is
how Earl Warren himself described his appointment:
"...the President told me how serious the situation was. He said
there had been wild rumours, and there was the international
situation to think of. He said he had just talked to Dean Rusk,
who was concerned, and he also mentioned the head of the
Atomic Energy Commission, who had told him how many
millions of people would be killed in an atomic war. The only
way to dispel these rumours, he said, was to have an independent
and responsible commission, and that there was no one to head
it except the highest judicial officer in the country. I told him
how I felt. He said if the public became aroused against Castro
and Khrushchev there might be war.
'You've been in uniform before,' he said, 'and if I asked you,
you would put on the uniform again for your country.'
I said, 'Of course'
'this is more important than that,' he said.
'If you're putting it like that,' I said, 'I can't say no'.” (Manchester,
Page 717).
The Democratic Party was also terrified that any left wing
association with the assassination would lead to a right wing
backlash resulting in the party losing power for a generation.
The Warren Commission succeeded in its immediate
objective of “dispelling rumours”. In the words of one of its
members, the future President Gerald Ford, “it told the truth,
but not the whole truth”. The whole truth was not revealed until
more than a decade later as a consequence of the Watergate
scandal.
The whole truth was that Oswald, the uneducated loser, had
penetrated one of the darkest secrets of the American State
and, much more than this, was prepared to act on it. That
was something the Warren Commission was not prepared to
investigate. And even when this truth was revealed, it was
obscured behind the Kennedy myth.
William Manchester was well aware of the power of myth
and played his part in perpetuating it. At the funeral of John
F. Kennedy a line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet was
quoted:
"...when he shall die, take him and cut out in little stars, And he
will make the face of heaven so fine. That all the world will be
in love with night. And pay no worship to the garish sun."
That is not true of anyone in all of history, but people have a
great need for it to be true and in this respect Manchester shows
some profound psychological insights into the Kennedy myth:
"What the folk hero was and what he believed are submerged
by the demands of those who follow him. In myth he becomes
what they want him to have been, and anyone who belittles
this transformation has an imperfect understanding of truth.
A romantic concept of what may have been can be far more
compelling than what was. 'Love is very penetrating,' Santayana
observed, 'but it penetrates to possibilities, rather than to facts'.
All the people ask of a national hero is that he should have been
truly heroic, a great man who was greatly loved and cruelly lost.
Glorification and embellishment follow. In love nations are no
less imaginative than individuals" (page 710).
9
In the case of a leader, who is cut down in his prime the
“possibilities” have not yet been tarnished by the “facts”. After
Kennedy’s death facts began to emerge which revealed Kennedy
to have been all too human, but we are too much in love with
the myth.
The facts must not be allowed to undermine the myth and
therefore they are distorted or explained away. This tendency
is most evident among conspiracy oriented writers, but is not
confined to them. To preserve the myth they must pretend, in
spite of all the evidence, that Oswald was a right winger and
that Kennedy had no responsibility for his actions on Cuba.
Cuba was to Kennedy, what Vietnam was to Johnson. It was
by far his most important foreign policy challenge. The actions
of the Kennedy Administration on this foreign policy matter do
not sit well with the Kennedy myth. The defenders of the myth
explain them away in two ways. Firstly, his policies on Cuba were
a continuation of those under the Eisenhower administration.
Secondly, he was not responsible for the policies pursued under
his administration. These policies were determined by the CIA,
which acted independently of the President.
Both defences are extremely weak. It is true that Eisenhower
did have a policy of assassinating Fidel Castro among other
world leaders (note 1), but there is no evidence of the Kennedy
administration ending that policy. Indeed, there is plenty
of evidence to the contrary, as we shall see later. It is very
significant that after Kennedy was assassinated the policy of
assassinating Castro was not continued (note 2).
The idea that the CIA acts independently of the President is
almost completely untrue. This independence of the CIA is a
fallacy, which is beloved of conspiracy theorists. Their theory
is that the CIA or some renegade element resented Kennedy
interfering in their activities and this gave them a motive for
killing the President. The theory appeals to the guardians of
the Kennedy myth because it exonerates the President of CIA
actions - in particular against Cuba - and it obfuscates Oswald’s
political motives.
The CIA is, in fact, the plaything of the President. The
Director of the CIA is appointed by the President and he can be
fired at his whim. In the mid 1970s the wise old Irish American
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noticed that Jimmy Carter
had become a defender of the CIA whereas before he became
President he was one of its sternest critics. Moynihan wryly
remarked: "he's just discovered it's his CIA."
The Central Intelligence Agency as its name suggests is
responsible for intelligence and counter intelligence in the
interests of the United States. Its sphere of operation is largely
outside the United States. However its counter intelligence
role involves the prevention of foreign subversion on domestic
soil. But on domestic matters it is subordinate to the FBI. The
State found itself in a legal minefield following the Kennedy
assassination. It appears that killing the President was not a
Federal crime and therefore the responsibility for its investigation
rested with the Dallas Police. However, following the setting
up of the Warren Commission there was no ambiguity. The
FBI was the lead investigator; the CIA’s role was to investigate
Oswald’s activities in the Soviet Union.
The other noteworthy feature of the CIA is that it is not
(arguably) subject to domestic law, or at least, it was not subject
10
to domestic law in the 1960s. This matter was put to the test
in 1964. In February of that year, a KGB operative called Yuri
Nosenko defected to the United States. He claimed that he
handled the case of Lee Harvey Oswald when the latter was in
the Soviet Union. Nosenko’s story was that Oswald was never
a KGB agent and that the Soviet authorities very quickly lost
interest in him. His Russian wife had anti socialist tendencies
and the Soviets were quite happy to see them both leave the
Soviet Union.
In the course of his interrogation it became very clear that
some of the information he gave about the KGB was wrong.
There then arose the question of why Nosenko was giving
incorrect information. One view was that he had exaggerated
his status within the KGB in order to ingratiate himself to his
hosts and that he had given information about aspects of the
KGB that he knew nothing about. The other view was that
Nosenko was not a genuine defector and was in fact a double
agent whose purpose was to spread misinformation.
The FBI accepted Nosenko’s bona fides, but the CIA was split
down the middle on the issue. The legendary head of counter
intelligence James Angleton believed he was a double agent.
This presented a problem for the CIA, which had Nosenko in its
custody. How could it release someone whom it thought might
be a double agent - and not just any double agent - but someone
who could conceivably have been spreading misinformation on
a matter concerning the assassination of a President. If, contrary
to Nosenko’s story, Oswald was a KGB agent and had been
acting as such when he killed the President, the implications
were staggering.
On the other hand, on what basis could it keep Nosenko
in custody? The principle of habeas corpus would require
him either to be released or stand trial. Richard Helms, who
was then a Deputy Director of the CIA and later became the
Director, said in his testimony to the House Select Committee
on Assassinations (HSCA) that the CIA sought legal advice
from among others the Deputy Attorney General of the United
States Nicholas Katzenbach.
The advice that was given was that Nosenko had the status of
"exclusion and parole," which meant that the Immigration and
Naturalization Service had technically excluded Mr. Nosenko
from the United States but had also temporarily "paroled him" to
the custody of the Central Intelligence Agency. This ingenious
piece of advice effectively meant that the CIA could do what it
wanted with Nosenko. It had always been the understanding that
the foreign activities of the CIA were not subject to American
law; it was now established that the CIA was not subject to
American law in relation to foreign citizens on American soil.
It should be said that Katzenbach in his testimony to the
HSCA (1979) denied that he had given such advice. In the
present writer’s view, Helms’ testimony is more credible, but
even if Katzenbach was being truthful it is indisputable that the
CIA acted as if it was above the law in this matter.
At the HSCA hearings an official CIA spokesman, designated
by the then Director of the CIA to testify on the Agency’s behalf,
described the conditions to which Nosenko was subjected.
Congressman Sawyer summarised the evidence as follows:
“Mr. Nosenko was taken into custody in this country by the
CIA after defection or after alleged defection, held in a so-
called safe house on a diet of tea and porridge twice a day,
was allowed no reading material. The guards were instructed
neither to talk to him or smile to him. He was subjected to
48 hours at a crack interrogation. This being while they built
a separate facility somewhere else in the country; namely, a
device described by him as a bank vault, and then built a house
around the bank vault to put this man in and then kept him there
under the equivalent of some 3 years with that kind of thing,
1,277 days to be specific, at which point they finally gave up
and gave him some emolument and put him on their payroll
and let him go.”
At no stage did Helms dispute this evidence. However he
did make the following defence, which would be hilarious, if it
were not so shocking:
“One of the problems we had with him [i.e. Nosenko – JM]
during his first period of time in the United States was he didn't
want to do anything except drink and carouse (note 3). We had
problems with him in an incident in Baltimore where he started
punching up a bar and so forth. One of the reasons to hold
him in confinement was to get him away from the booze and
settle him down and see if we could make some sense with him.
The fact that he may have been held too long was therefore
deplorable, but nevertheless we were doing our best.”
But although the CIA was not subject to domestic law it
does not follow that it is autonomous. The President determines
policy and then makes careful arrangements not to know how
the policy is implemented. The elected representative of the
people must be above reproach.
The biggest scandal of Watergate was that the burglars had CIA
connections. Richard Helms, who was then the Director of the CIA,
was sacked by Nixon for being less than compliant on a domestic
matter. It was perfectly acceptable for the CIA to be unleashed on
the world, but the Washington Establishment could not stomach it
being used as the President’s weapon in domestic politics. After
Watergate the lid was lifted on the CIA and the Republican Party
made sure that if there were secrets to be revealed they would not
be restricted to the Nixon Administration.
It suited both the Republicans and Democrats to pretend that
the CIA was autonomous and independent of the President. But
if the fiction was to be preserved someone in the CIA had to be
sacrificed – or appear to be sacrificed – in order to protect the
innocence of the people.
Richard Helms was the ideal scapegoat. His career in the
CIA spanned the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon
eras. Unusually, his appointment by Johnson to the position of
Director of the CIA was not regarded as political. It only arose
after Johnson’s original choice was forced to resign because of
sheer incompetence. The fact that Helms was not well connected
with either party made him particularly vulnerable.
Helms’ biographer, Thomas Powers, notes that despite his
austere appearance he liked to dine in the best Washington
restaurants, but he did not want to dine alone. He wanted to
preserve his pension entitlements while remaining loyal to his
erstwhile colleagues in the CIA.
The political establishment, on the other hand, wanted
to punish a representative of the CIA, but not too much; not
enough to undermine the functioning of the State.
There was no possibility of Helms being charged with the
attempted murder of Castro or the torture of Nosenko. It was
decided that he would be charged with the relatively trivial
offence of lying to a Senate Committee on CIA involvement in
the overthrow of Allende in 1973. Note: lying to the Senate was
the charge; not overthrowing the government of Chile.
The matter was concluded in November, 1977 when Helms
entered a plea of nolo contendere. In other words he did not
admit guilt, but on the other hand did not contest the charge. The
presiding judge Judge Barrington D. Parker issued a suitably
pompous and hypocritical rebuke:
"You considered yourself bound to protect the Agency....Public
officials at every level, whatever their position, like any other
person, must respect and honor the Constitution and the laws
of the United States."
He fined Helms 2,000 dollars and gave him a two year
suspended sentence. Powers notes in his book that after the
hearing Helms was driven to Bethesda, Maryland where he
was given a standing ovation by 400 retired CIA officers, who
stuffed two waste paper baskets full of cash and cheques which
more than covered the 2,000 dollar fine.
Helms had taken a hit without undermining the
organisation.
At the HSCA hearings some politicians expressed
dissatisfaction at the former CIA Director’s lenient treatment.
But Helms was having none of it. In a reply to Congressman
Christopher Dodd he made his feelings clear:
“…you are singling me out as to why I didn't march up and tell
the Warren Commission when these operations against Cuba
were known to the Attorney General of the United States, the
Secretary of Defence, the Secretary of State, the Assistant to
the President for National Security Affairs, the President of the
United States himself although he at that point was dead. All
kinds of people knew about these operations high up in the
Government. Why am I singled out as the fellow who should
have gone up and identified a Government operation to get rid
of Castro? It was a Government wide operation, supported by
the Defence Department, supported by the National Security
Council, supported by almost everybody in a high position in
the Government.”
He also revealed some interesting information on how the
anti Castro militias were financed:
“In December of 1962 the brigade comes back to the United
States having been bought off with drug supplies by the Attorney
General [i.e. Bobby Kennedy – JM], et cetera. President
Kennedy went to the Orange Bowl in Miami and greeted them
in December 1962 and assured them, and this may not be an
exact quote, as follows: "I will return this banner to this brigade
in a free Havana". Those operations went on nonstop during
1963. If that doesn't indicate there was bad blood between
President Kennedy and Fidel Castro, I don't know what does.”
It was very clear that if a more serious charge were brought
against Helms he would have had an unimpeachable defence:
all his actions were authorised by the President. The American
political establishment - unlike its Irish counterpart in 1970 (the
11
Arms Trial) – was not prepared to risk the damage to the State
that would ensue.
While in the 1970s, following the Watergate scandal, there
was a dramatic increase in the level of Congressional oversight
of the CIA, no such condition applied during the Kennedy
era. It is also the case that there was never greater Presidential
involvement in the day-to-day operations of the CIA than during
the Kennedy era.
In the Autumn of 1961 Bobby Kennedy was assigned to deal
with the CIA. The code name for the post-Bay of Pigs plan to
“get rid of Castro” was “Operation Mongoose”. Thomas Powers
in his book notes:
“William Harvey, head of Task Force W, the CIA's end of
Operation Mongoose, received an official memo from Edward
G. Lansdale, the Kennedy brothers' personal choice to run
Mongoose on August 13, 1962. The memo asked Harvey to
prepare papers on various anti-Castro programs "including
liquidation of leaders". Harvey told him of the "stupidity of
putting this type of comment in writing in such a document".
Here again the problem was the “stupidity of putting this type
of comment in writing” rather than the policy of assassination
itself. According to Powers, Harvey was told by Richard Bissell
- a deputy director of the CIA before he resigned after the Bay
of Pigs fiasco - that the policy of assassination came from the
White House.
"No Kennedy programme received less publicity than Operation
Mongoose or more personal attention from the Kennedys, and
in particular from Bobby" (Powers, P135).
Can anyone seriously believe that two Kennedy appointees
(McNamara and Lansdale) could separately come up with
the idea of assassinating Castro independently of President
Kennedy?
Operation Mongoose was the single largest clandestine
program within the CIA. Robert Kennedy kept himself briefed
on the operation by the Director of the CIA, John McCone, who
was a Kennedy appointee. But he also was in frequent contact
with Helms and lower ranking CIA operatives.
Of course, knowledge of the assassination policy was not
confined to the Kennedy Administration. The intended victim
could not fail to be aware of the unsuccessful attempts on his
life.
There is no ambiguity about Operation Mongoose’s objective
of “getting rid of Castro”. “Getting rid of Castro” could mean
just overthrowing Castro’s regime without actually killing him,
although as Richard Helms pointed out in his HSCA testimony,
one of the consequences of regime change is that the leader
of the deposed government tends to be killed. However, we
know now - since the CIA has admitted it - that “getting rid of
Castro” did include assassinating him. There is no doubt about
that. However, there may be some doubt – but not much - as to
who knew what.
In the present writer’s view the Kennedys were aware of
assassination plans and indeed initiated them in such a way that
would give them “future deniability” to use a phrase of Admiral
Poindexter in the Iran-Contra controversy many years later.
Powers notes:
"On August 10, 1962...the Special Group Augmented held a
meeting in the office of Secretary of State Dean Rusk to discuss
Operation Mongoose, the Kennedy administration's post-Bay
of Pigs plan to get rid of Castro". Secretary of Defense Robert
McNamara suggested that "perhaps the SGA ought to consider
solving the Castro problem by killing him.”
This was ruled out of order and was not included in the
minutes. Later the Director of the CIA John McCone phoned
McNamara and "protested that talk of assassination was
completely inappropriate in such a meeting and that he didn't
want to hear any more of it" (Powers, p129).
It seems that McCone’s real objection was that the forum
at which the matter was discussed would require some form of
record.
It should be emphasised that McNamara was a Kennedy
appointee and was not a CIA man. But was McNamara on a
solo run? It seems unlikely. Elsewhere Powers notes:
12
In September 1963, just over two months before the
assassination, Fidel Castro gave an interview to Daniel Harker
of the Associated Press at the Brazilian Embassy in Havana.
In the course of the interview in which he described President
Kennedy as a “cretin” and the “Batista of the times” he made
the following remark:
“We are prepared to fight them and answer in kind. United
States leaders should think that if they are aiding terrorist plans
to eliminate Cuban leaders, they themselves will not be safe”
(Summers, p436).
There is absolutely no evidence that Castro ever attempted
to assassinate Kennedy, but the thought was in his mind.
And a thought, once expressed, can have a curious existence
independent of its originator. The thought was carried in various
American newspapers, most notably the front page of The
Times-Picayune (9/9/63), a venerable New Orleans newspaper.
In September 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald, the pro Castro activist,
was residing in that city.
If Oswald had somehow missed The Times Picayune report,
he could hardly have failed to notice that the thought had made
its way into the various left wing publications to which he
subscribed.
Of course in any one day there are millions of thoughts
expressed. The vast majority of them if they penetrate the mind
of the reader at all are quickly forgotten. It cannot be known
for certain what influence Castro’s thought had on the mind of
Oswald.
However, an acquaintance of Oswald, Michael Paine,
testified to the Warren Commission that in October 1963
Oswald had said to him:
“…you could tell what they [the Daily Worker - JM] wanted
you to do … by reading between the lines”.
Paine said he had tried to read the issue that Oswald had
given him and had no idea what he was talking about.
There is no accounting for how people react to information
that is given to them. A normal person, with the information
available in 1963, might have dismissed Castro’s thought as
anti-American propaganda or the ravings of a paranoid leftist.
Only a very select few knew that the Kennedy administration
was engaged in a plot to assassinate Castro. For most people in
1963 the idea would have appeared preposterous.
However, Oswald “knew” that the Kennedy Administration
was indeed plotting to kill Castro. This could have been evidence
of his insanity. There was no rational reason why the waiflike Oswald with no inside knowledge or connections could
“know” what other more informed, educated and intelligent
people did not know. It could be said that it was chance or a
freak occurrence, but that doesn’t quite capture the complex
elements at play. It would be nearer to the truth to say that the
Gods had intervened. There was a logic to the assassination of
Kennedy, but it was beyond the control of any individual or
group. Oswald did not plan to be in a building overlooking the
Presidential motorcade route; it just happened that his place of
employment was there, which he had secured long before the
Presidential route had been planned.
Bobby Kennedy knew this. His private investigators had
confirmed that Oswald had acted alone long before the Warren
Commission had reached the same conclusion. But it was no
consolation to him. He and his brother had conspired to kill
Castro. They had sowed the wind. Although the chain of cause
and effect was obscure and complicated, he must have come to
the anguished realisation that their own actions had reaped the
whirlwind. That was something he had to live with for the few
years that remained of his life.

counter intelligence during the Vietnam War. It was only at
a late stage when it began spying on the South Vietnamese
government that it realised the extent of Viet Cong
infiltration of that government. Any information that the
US had sent to Saigon was quickly leaked to the enemy.
2) Lyndon Johnson continued the policy of destabilising
Cuba, but it appears that there was no longer a policy of
assassinating Castro.
3) From Febuary to April 1964, Nosenko was given some
freedom pending the construction of the “safe house”.
Bibliography
Mailer, Norman; Oswald's Tale: An American Mystery;
Random House; 1995.
Manchester, William; The Death of a President: November
20–November 25, 1963; Harper & Row, 1967.
Powers, Thomas; The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard
Helms and the CIA; Knopf, 1979.
Summers, Anthony; Conspiracy: Who Killed President
Kennedy; Fontana, 1980.
More Publications from Athol Books:
* Millstreet Miscellany (5). 60pp (A4) ISBN 9781-903497-65-4. AHS. August 2010. €10, £8
* William O'Brien & His World by Brendan
Clifford. 16pp. AHS. ISBN 978-1-903497-64-7. €6, £5 Notes:
* Seán Moylan—was he a rebel? by Jack Lane. A
review of Aideen Carroll's Seán Moylan—Rebel
1) The CIA attempted to assassinate Fidel Castro; Congolese
Leader.
20pp ISBN 978-1-903497-61-6. AHS. leader Patrice Lumumba; President Rafael Trujillio of the
Dominican Republic; and Rene Schneider the commander
May 2010. €6, £5
and chief of the Chilean Army. All of these plots were
* Pat Murphy: Social Republican. 1937-2009. revealed in a collection of CIA documents known as the
A tribute to his life and work. Edited by Philip
“Family Jewels”. None of them were successful. In the case
O'Connor. 60pp, with colour photos. ISBN 978of Lumumba the British got there first (Agence France
Presse, 4/2/13).
0-955316-30-4. Howth Free Press. 2009. €10, £8
* Whither Northern Ireland? by Brendan
The failure of the CIA to assassinate these leaders puts a
Clifford. 16pp ISBN 978-1-874157-23-6. A Belfast
dent in the idea beloved of conspiracy theorists that the CIA
Magazine No. 36. February 2010 €6, £5
is an omnipotent force. Richard Helms claims in Powers’
* Remembering Gallipoli, President McAleese's
book that he never liked the CIA’s black operations. His
objection was less to do with morality and more to do with
Great War Crusade by Dr. Pat Walsh. 28pp. ISBN
the fact that the organisation was not very good at them.
978-1-903497-24-3. ABM No. 37. €6, £5
* An Affair With The Bishop Of Cork. ISBN
On the other hand, Helms defends the record of the CIA
978-1-903497-61-6. AHS. November 2009. €10, in its core competence of intelligence. He says that the CIA
£8.
was able to tell the President in advance that the “6 day
war” in the Middle East would be short and that the Israelis
*
would win it.
The Famed Hill Of Clara. ISBN 978-1-90349759-3. AHS. November 2009. €10, £8.
He also claims that their information on North
Vietnamese military strength was far more accurate than
US army’s intelligence, which President Johnson relied on
for his decisions. But he admits that the CIA fell down on
* Millstreet Miscellany (3). ISBN 978-1-90349760-9. AHS. October 2009. €10, £8.
13
Conor Cruise O'Brien: Diplomat or Dictator? - A Preview
by Pat Muldowney
[Pat Muldowney is translating from Irish a 1974 book by
Risteard O Glaisne on Conor Cruise O'Brien. O'Brien served
in the Irish diplomatic corps and was seconded to the United
Nations for Katanga/Congo. Parts of it are quite illuminating
re the then-independence of Irish foreign policy, taking a firm
stand against western imperialism at the height of the Cold War.
He presents the book to IFA readers in this article.]
Conor Cruise O'Brien agus an Liobrálachas,
by Risteárd Ó Glaisne, Clódhanna Teo., 1974.
In 1960 the Belgian colony of Congo became independent.
Belgium, aided by France, Britain, the USA and apartheid-era
South Africa, militarily backed a secessionist puppet regime in
the mineral-rich southern province of Katanga.
Following the murder in 1961, by Katangese forces, of
Patrice Lumumba, socialist Prime Minister of the Congo, the
United Nations sent military forces, including Irish soldiers, to
the Congo to prevent the break-up of that country.
The Fianna Fáil foreign policy of non-alignment with either
side in the Cold War had been successfully implemented in
the U.N. by Fianna Fáil minister Frank Aiken. An Irish career
diplomat was put in charge of the U.N. operation, including a
U.N. military campaign against secessionist Katanga.
In the course of this action the U.N. General Secretary Dag
Hammarskjold was killed in a mysterious plane crash while
attempting a political settlement. A company of Irish soldiers
under siege by secessionists was forced to surrender, and the
Hammarskjold plan was defeated. Under U.S. rather than
Belgian influence, Katanga was re-integrated into the Congo
state in 1962, and the Katanga secessionist leader Moise
Tshombe became Prime Minister of Congo in 1964.
The professional diplomat representing Dag Hammarskjold
in the Congo was Conor Cruise O'Brien. In his 1974 book Conor Cruise O'Brien agus an Liobrálachas (Liberalism) author Risteárd Ó Glaisne tracked O'Brien's life and career up to
that point: including his post-U.N. academic activities in Ghana
and New York, and his subsequent political role in Ireland.
In 1974 O'Brien was Labour Party Minister for Posts and
Telegraphs in a Fine Gael-Labour Coalition government, in
which he was acquiring notoriety for censorship and other
authoritarian methods. By examining O'Brien's actions,
statements and writings up to that point, Ó Glaisne's book
seeks to understand the apparent paradox of, on the one hand,
O'Brien's left-liberal writings, and, on the other hand, his
authoritarian activities in government. What emerges in this
1974 study is a degree of intellectual inconsistency, aggravated
by O'Brien's rather arrogant temperament. In 1974 the full
pattern of O'Brien's relationship to Irish nationalism had yet to
manifest itself.
Born in 1917 to Catholic/agnostic parents, O'Brien said he
experienced the 1932 Fianna Fáil electoral victory as a relief
from conservative clericalist oppression. He joined the Irish
Department of Finance as a professional civil servant in 1942,
transferring to the Department of External Affairs in 1944.
O'Brien claimed that his transfer from Finance to External
Affairs was made possible by Frank Aiken, who had to wield his
14
political influence against the opposition of Joe Walshe, the civil
servant permanent head of the Department of External Affairs.
Walshe was an extreme Catholic who had been appointed under
the earlier Treatyite Clann na nGaedheal government.
O'Brien's own account of these matters was published in an
American magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, in 1994:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/
ireland/cruis194.htm
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/
ireland/cruis794.htm
In the latter article O'Brien attempts to justify his seemingly
paradoxical conduct:
... I claim an underlying consistency and continuity. I was
brought up to detest imperialism, epitomized in the manic and
haunting figure of Captain Bowen-Colthurst, who murdered my
uncle Frank Sheehy-Skeffington during the Easter Rising. As a
servant of the United Nations, I combated a British imperialist
enterprise in Central Africa in 1961--the covert effort to sustain
secession in Katanga in order to bolster the masked white
supremacy of the then Central African Federation. From 1965
to 1969, in America, I took part in the protest movement against
an American imperialist enterprise: the war in Vietnam. And
from 1971 until now I have been combating an Irish Catholic
imperialist enterprise: the effort to force the Protestants of
Northern Ireland, by a combination of paramilitary terror and
political pressure, into a United Ireland that they don't want.
I addressed the Friends of the Union to show solidarity with
that beleaguered community against the forces working against
them within my own community. And I suppose my Protestant
education has something to do with that solidarity.
Risteárd Ó Glaisne (1927–2003) was born Richard Ernest
Giles near Bandon, Co. Cork. The family, Methodist in religion,
was settled in the area from the 16th century Munster Plantation.
Ó Glaisne learned Irish Republicanism from teachers in Bandon
Grammar School, and his command of the Irish language was
perfected in the Blasket Islands. When the Blasket population
moved to the mainland in 1953, Ó Glaisne was trusted by them
to manage details of the transfer on their behalf.
A teacher by profession, he was also heavily involved in
religious ecumenism and the Irish language movement and
wrote many books in Irish and English on current affairs.
Conor Cruise O'Brien's espousal of Ulster Protestant antiRepublicanism seems to have been the motivation for Ó
Glaisne's detailed 1974 study of what O'Brien was "all about".
In more recent times another Cork teacher (subsequently
university academic) Alan Titley has played a similar role
in analysis and commentary in the Irish language. Titley's
background is Catholic. Irish language broadcasting, journalism,
analysis and commentary is, on the whole, of a higher standard
than the English language variety - perhaps because the
participants are more motivated and less mercenary.
A study of Conor Cruise O'Brien by Niall Meehan can be
read in Counterpunch:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2008/12/22/conor-cruise-obrien-1917-2008/

Starving the Germans: the Evolution of Britain’s Strategy of Economic Warfare
During the First World War—the French Connection Part 3
by Eamon Dyas
Eugène Etienne, the power behind the Entente
Cordiale.
The most significant individual in the French colonial
movement from the late nineteenth century up to the First
World War was Eugène Etienne who was born in the district of
Oran in Algeria. After moving to Paris he became a successful
businessman but returned to Algeria in 1881 where he was
elected to the Chamber of Deputies as a representative of Oran
and champion of the colonist minority. He was Under-Secretary
in the Colonial Department 1887-88 and again in 1889-92. By
1904 he was Vice-President of the Chamber of Deputies and
President of the Foreign Affairs group in the Chamber and in
January 1905 he became Minister of the Interior as a result of
changes in the Cabinet of Maurice Rouvier (with whom he was
also a business associate). Etienne was an imperialist but he
was also an Algerian colonist who believed that French foreign
policy should concentrate on consolidating its territorial empire
close to home in north Africa rather then wasting resources
in far-flung territories that were more trouble than they were
worth. He viewed the Egyptian issue in this context and rather
than expend effort on gaining territory in Egypt—effort that had
little chance of success—he advocated bartering French interest
in the area for control of Morocco, something that he viewed as
critical to continuing French control of Algeria:
“It was Etienne’s Moroccan pressure group which most
strongly supported the idea of an Anglo-French barter of Egypt
and Morocco and sought to convert to it Theophile Delcassé,
French Foreign Minister from 1898 to 1905. Since the start of
his political career Delcassé had been closely identified with
colonist policies and had been a founder member of the groupe
colonial in the Chamber. As Minister of Colonies in 1894 he
had received a presentation from the parti colonial . . . . and
he became Foreign Minister in June 1898 partly as a result of
colonialist support. Etienne and his friends made their first
attempt to convert Delcassé to the policy of an Egypt-Morocco
barter in the autumn of 1898 and during the Anglo-French
crisis caused by Marchand’s arrival at Fashoda.” (Christopher
Andrew, France and the Making of the Entente Cordiale,
Historical Journal, Vol.10, No 1, 1967, pp.92-93).
Etienne’s position within the wider imperialist group was
not one that was universally held. As has been stated, it was not
shared by Delcassé at the time of his appointment as Foreign
Minister in 1898. It was not until after abandoning his attempts
to get an anti-British agreement with Germany and having
been thwarted by Britain in his efforts to partition Morocco
with Spain, that he changed his mind in early 1903. Delcassé
was more of a classical imperialist whose vision was not
easily diverted by a perspective that viewed the empire from
that of the restricted perspective of the North African colonist.
Nonetheless Etienne’s views were supported by a significant
alliance of politicians, businessmen and senior military figures
even though it was a minority position, particularly in the
Chamber of Deputies. In these circumstances he saw that the
best way of advancing his opinions was not in open political
debate but by lobbying in the dark corridors of the Chamber.
He sought means of restricting debate on issues affecting his
programme to the narrowest band of participants even if this
meant the exclusion of part of his own wider group from access
to information and political discussion. Thus, early on in the
proceedings he was instrumental in convincing the groupe
colonial to use their influence in the Chamber to ensure that
parliamentary debate on foreign affairs be restricted to those
occasions when public discussion would not interfere with
diplomatic negotiations. This meant that on those occasions
where an issue of foreign affairs was the subject of diplomatic
contact, there would be no discussion on the issue in the French
Parliament. This objective achieved, it meant that:
“The preference for private, rather than public, pressure
inevitably necessitated the concentration of initiative in
relatively few hands. The groupe colonial as a whole was too
amorphous a body to be kept in a permanent state of mobilization
or to maintain the necessary secrecy.” (C. M. Andrew and A. S.
Kanya-Forstner, The French ‘Colonial Party’: its Composition,
Aims and Influence, 1885-1914 in The Historical Journal,
Vol.14, No1, march 1971, p.110).
He could then use the necessity of “required” secrecy to
neutralise the majority position in the wider Chamber and
advance that of his own. By the time that serious negotiations
began with Britain in the run-up to the Entente Cordiale he
had more or less set the momentum and direction of such talks,
at least from the French side. Besides making life as difficult
for Delcassé as possible in the French Chamber prior to his
conversion, Etienne and his supporters had begun their own
secret overtures to Britain. This began to pay off at the start
of 1903 when Britain initiated a strategy that had as its object
the prevention of an alliance between France and Germany—an
alliance, as we have already seen, that Delcassé had previously
attempted. Determined to take advantage of Britain’s new
strategy in seeking an agreement with France, Etienne
maintained the pressure on Delcassé:
“Even after Delcassé told Etienne in the Spring of 1903 that
he intended to open negotiations with England, Etienne did
not relax his pressure. He preceded Delcassé’s visit to England
in July 1903 by an article in the National Review advocating
an exchange of interests in Egypt and Morocco and by a visit
of his own to England to discuss the idea with Lansdowne,
Chamberlain, Balfour and other English politicians. Delcassé’s
private secretary wrote to a friend that Etienne seemed to have
been convinced by his visit that, in return for Egypt, England
would allow France a free hand in Morocco . . .” (Andrew,
France and the Making of the Entente Cordiale, op. cit.,
pp.102-103).
But clinching the deal was problematic as at no time during
the negotiations was the wider French Cabinet made aware of
them. In that situation, Etienne (who at this time was not even
part of the Government), having laid out the road in advance
was then forced to sit back and trust that what he had arranged
would come to fruition.
15
“In England, approval of the Entente was in every sense
a collective decision by the cabinet as a whole. As soon as
negotiations with France began in July 1903, Lansdowne asked
for the views of other government departments. Throughout
the course of negotiations the cabinet was regularly consulted
and its approval sought. In France, however, the cabinet did not
discover the outline of the proposed agreement until negotiations
had been in progress for six months. While Lansdowne
referred throughout the negotiations to the views of the British
cabinet, the French ambassador referred simply to the views of
‘Monsieur Delcassé’. And the bargain which formed the basis
of the Entente—the barter of Egypt and Morocco—was urged
on Delcassé not by his colleagues in the cabinet, but by Eugène
Etienne and the leaders of the parti colonial.”
(C. M. Andrew, The French Colonialist Movement during
the Third Republic: the unofficial mind of imperialism, in
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 26, 1976,
pp.161-162).
Once confident that the talks were on track Etienne then set
about galvanising domestic support for what he saw as the future
French arrangements in Morocco—arrangements that had as a
central component the encouragement and ensnarement of the
Sultan in French financial commitments.
“In December 1903, four months before the signing of the
Entente, the Déjeuner du Maroc became the nucleus of a new
Comité du Maroc with Etienne as its first president. Part of
Etienne’s purpose in transforming an informal pressure group
into a formal organization was doubtless to raise funds. In
this he was eminently successful. During its first year the new
committee collected 180,000 frs, of which over 50 per cent
came in large subscriptions of 1,000 frs or more from financial
institutions. There is little doubt that the benevolence of the
banks was prompted by expectations of financial reward, the
expectation in particular, of the Comité du Maroc’s assistance
in arranging a series of lucrative loans to the Sultan. The largest
single donation after its first year—12,000 frs in 1910 from
a syndicate of Paris banks which had just negotiated a new
Moroccan loan—seems to have been given in recognition of
such assistance.
The Comité du Maroc’s opponents inevitably sought to brand
it as ‘an organisation of financiers . . . . the value of whose
securities stood to rise with a French occupation’. But anxious
though it was to encourage French investment in Morocco,
the Comité was equally anxious to prevent an uncontrolled
scramble for concessions. . . And though eager to establish
French control of Moroccan finances, it was privately critical
of the extortionate terms imposed on the Sultan by the banks.”
(Andrew and Kanya-Forstner, op. cit., pp.115-116).
The role of French banks in destabilising the Government
of Morocco will be gone into later. At this stage it is clear
that Etienne’s private reservations regarding the extortionate
terms that the banks imposed on the Sultan have to be taken
with a pinch of salt as they did not get in the way of his larger
ambition. Within the year Etienne’s Comité was also involved
in supporting illegal military preparations for the eventual
French takeover of Morocco:-
16
“The Comité du Maroc quickly spent its first years’ revenue.
Through the French legation in Morocco with which it had
close links, it founded a pro-French Arabic newspaper and
established two new French schools. It also commissioned a
geological survey of Morocco and subsidized expeditions to
various parts of the country. These expeditions were presented
to the public simply as geographical explorations. In reality
they were meant to map out the land for an eventual military
occupation by General Lyautey’s forces on the Algerian border.
One of the explorers, Segonzac, was described by Lyautey’s
deputy, Saint-Aulaire, as an ‘éclaireur de notre armée’. In
addition, the Comité du Maroc secretly gave Lyautey funds to
assist, by bribery, the ‘discreet penetration’ of Morocco which
he pursued in defiance of his orders from Paris. Jonnart, the
Governor-General of Algeria, urged the Comité to continue the
good work. (ibid., p.116)
Colonel Hubert Lyautey, a friend of Etienne and a keen
advocate of Moroccan annexation, had taken command of
the Ain Sefra garrison in the Southern Oran Province in 1903.
Lyautey was also a close friend of Jonnart, the GovernorGeneral of Algeria and we will come across Saint-Aulaire again
in the context of the bombardment of Casablanca. Thus was
put in place the unholy alliance between finance, military and
politicians which was the critical development that led to the
eventual French takeover of Morocco.
This also was the expression in French politics with which
Britain formed an alliance when she signed the Entente Cordiale
in April 1904. That expression continued to pursue its hidden
agenda in the immediate aftermath of the Entente and in full
confidence of Britain’s acquiescence. In January 1905 the Prime
Minister of France and friend of Etienne, Maurice Rouvier,
appointed him Minister of the Interior in a cabinet reshuffle.
Etienne now had control over the area of Southern Oran since
Algeria came under the jurisdiction of the Interior Ministry and
this enabled him to consolidate the military and administrative
arrangements for a proposed incursion into Morocco when
the time was deemed favourable. Etienne was given yet more
influence in November 1905 when he was moved to become
Minister of War.
“In the fall of 1905, Etienne, who had taken over the portfolio
of the War Ministry, requested that his allies in the Tangiers
legation come to Paris to exchange views on the Moroccan
situation. Saint-Aulaire and Captain Leon Jouinot-Gambetta,
who was a nephew of Leon Gambetta and protégé of Etienne,
were invited to Paris. The reasoning behind this move was
simple; Etienne was now in a position to affect the military
situation along the Algerian-Moroccan border. Already, as the
new chief of the War Office, he was planning to promote Lyautey
to the position of commander of the Division of Oran. Linked
with a War Minister who was an imperialist militant, Lyautey
prepared for continued action on the Algerian-Moroccan border
against those unspecified Moroccan bandits.” (Lyautey and
Etienne: The Soldier and the Politician in the Penetration of
Morocco, 1904-1906, by James J. Cooke. Published in Military
Affairs by the Society for Military History, Vol. 36, No. 1,
February 1972. p.17).
But then the Germans spoiled the party by backing the
Sultan’s demands for an international conference on the
future of Morocco. As a result, less than six months into his
new position, Rouvier, with Russia incapable of fulfilling its
military commitments to France and unsure of Britain’s will
and capacity to provide an effective alternative through military
support, put pressure on Delcassé to resign rather than risk a war
with Germany. Delcassé was replaced in June 1905 by Leon
Bourgeois who was more in sympathy with Etienne’s mixture
of diplomacy and hidden action in his approach to Morocco.
But Etienne’s influence now extended beyond the Minister of
Foreign Affairs in Rouvier’s Government:
“Determined immediately to expand military forces in Algeria,
Etienne suggested to Maurice Berteaux, the Minister of War,
that troops in the Sahara be reorganized into more mobile
striking units. Citing more examples of alleged depredations
committed by unspecified Moroccan ‘bandits’ in southern
Algeria, Etienne called for more military troops along the
Algerian-Moroccan border. Knowing that such an action would
disturb Morocco’s government and civilian population, Etienne
used all of his massive political influence to see that it was
done.” (ibid., p.17).
By the end of 1905, Etienne and his group believed they
were in a position to oversee a takeover of Morocco but the
decision of the French Government to take part in the proposed
German conference on Morocco and the outcome of that
conference under the terms of the Act of Algeciras proved a
disappointement to their ambitions. However, as we will see
later this was only a temporary setback as the arrangements
put in place by Etienne did not go away – the fact that it was
Lyautey’s military forces that led the invasion and occupation
of Oudjda in April 1907 in defiance of the Act of Algeciras is
testimony to this.
A diversionary word about Etienne’s political tactics in the
French Chamber in manipulating his country to a takeover
of Morocco in 1911. The manner in which he manufactured
an atmosphere of Parliamentary secrecy leading up to the
negotiations with Britain prior to the Entente Cordiale and
after were uncannily similar to those adopted by the Liberal
Imperialists in the years prior to war. In the aftermath of the
French colonialist endgame at Fez in 1911 his tactics in Morocco
became an object of interest in Britain which was reflected in
an article in The Nation:
“The art of conducting this game lies in creating at each stage
a situation which leads inevitably to the next. . . It avoids the
presentation of a clear issue to the electorate and Parliament,
with whose consent to the ulterior plans the manipulators of the
manoeuvre contrive to dispense. There can be little doubt that if
the French people or the French Chamber were asked to answer
with a ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ whether they desired to embark upon the
conquest of Morocco, their decision would be an emphatic and
nearly unanimous negative.” (Modern Methods of Conquest,
published in The Nation, 6 May 1911. Quoted in Andrew and
Kanya-Forstner, op. cit., pp.124-125).
The similarities between Etienne’s tactics in 1911 in bringing
about the French invasion of Fez and the methods used by the
Liberal Imperialists in leading Britain into war in August 1914
is unmistakable and indeed not dissimilar to the methods used
by modern democracies as navigation tools to war.
French politics after Algeciras.
With Delcassé’s position becoming increasingly marginalised,
the movement for accepting the Moroccan-German proposal for
an international conference gained momentum in France and
was given impetus as other countries began to fall in behind the
proposal. The Moroccan-German proposal was first accepted
by Italy and then by Austria followed by the other powers until,
finally, by France and Britain. The international conference was
held at Algeciras in Spain between 16 January and 7 April 1906
and out of it came what was known as the Act of Algeciras.
The main element of the agreement behind this Act was the
restoration of Morocco’s future ‘based upon the independence of
the Sultan, and the integrity of his dominions,’and providing that
if any precedent arrangement between the Powers and Morocco
conflicted with the stipulations of the Act, the stipulations of
the Act should prevail. In other words, any arrangements which
France may have made with Morocco prior to the Act were
now null and void if such arrangements infringed the stated
independence of Morocco. However, under the terms of the Act
Germany recognised the right of France to assist in the Sultan’s
administration of the country and also agreed for Spain and
France to be given responsibility for policing the Moroccan
ports. Germany managed to achieve its own agenda through the
acceptance by the other Powers of her legitimate right of access
to the Moroccan economy for its commerce and enterprise and
the right to equality of treatment in the allocation of public works
contracts issued by the administrative authorities of Morocco
(this included contracts issued directly by the Government of
Morocco and the French authorities in Morocco).
Prior to and after his departure Delcassé had come to
represent that element in French politics which wished to
confront Germany head on and rely on the ability of France and
her allies to win any subsequent war. The failure of this approach,
culminating in the Act of Algeciras, led to a significant change in
French politics. But, despite its failure, the thinking represented
by Delcassé continued to hold sway among an influential
section of civil servants, younger nationalist politicians and
diplomats associated with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in
what became known as the ‘bureaux’. The ‘bureaux’ also had
allies among significant members of the French military as well
as politicians and industrialists. As a result, in the years after the
Act of Algeciras, French foreign policy in general and the Act
of Algeciras in particular, became an arena where its direction
was contended between the school of thought represented by
Delcassé at one extreme and, on the other, those who sought
an accommodation with Germany with the more pragmatic
followers of Etienne fluctuating between both camps:“In the years after the conference of Algeciras French foreign
policy was dominated by the question of Morocco. The nation
as a whole was profoundly pacific, apathetic towards Morocco
and averse to any policy of advance there that might provoke
war. This attitude was markedly reflected in parliamentary
opinion and the government, headed since October 1906 by
Clemenceau with his protégé Pichon at the foreign office,
proclaimed its adhesion to the act of Algeciras. Apart from the
general apathy stood, however, a small but active and influential
minority determined that Morocco should fall to France. To all
who desired this ‘national solution’ it was plain that the prime
obstacle was Germany but there were differences of opinion
as to the course that France should adopt. For some it was
important to resist all attempts by German interests to infiltrate
into Morocco and to be wary of entering an agreement with
Germany on the problem. ‘For her’, warned a commentator in
the organ of the Comité de l’Afrique française in January 1907,
‘Morocco is a bait with which she seeks to get us to swallow the
hook which would tie us to the general policy of the German
empire.’ France, in the view of this group, which represented
the Delcassé tradition, should defend her position in Morocco
and seek where possible to extend it, trusting in herself and
her friends to solve the question ultimately in her favour. In
contrast stood those who, far from fearing Franco-German
rapprochement, hoped for it, not only as a means to secure
Morocco but as in the best interests of France.” (The FrancoGerman Agreement on Morocco, 1909 by E. W. Edwards.
17
Published in The English Historical Review, Vol. 78, No. 308,
July 1963, pp.483-484).
It is not strictly correct to attribute a position to Clemenceau
and his foreign minister Pichon as one which consisted of them
simply accepting the Act of Algeciras to the detriment of French
ambitions in Morocco. Both politicians continued to harbour
such ambitions and, although Clemenceau was not a great
advocate of French expansion, he always said that he made
an exception when it came to Morocco. What Clemenceau
believed was that the gaining of Morocco was not worth the
risk of a war with Germany.
With regards to the military arrangements with Britain he was
more of a sceptic. He did not believe that Britain had the ability,
in terms of its military commitment to France, to compensate for
the loss of Russia’s military commitment (so lost as a result of
the Russo-Japanese war and the 1905 Revolution) in the event
of such a war. Under such circumstances the best policy was to
operate within the terms of the Act of Algeciras by which it was
possible over time for the special interest of France in Morocco
to be accepted by Germany. He acknowledged that the key to
this acceptance was German agreement and he sought, within
the constraints of the alliance with Britain, to further the cause
of that acceptance. In nurturing German goodwill within the
terms of the Act of Algeciras he differed from those colonialists
who, having no sense of obligation to the Act, nonetheless,
recognised that in its aftermath the cooperation of Germany was
required to advance French claims in Morocco. This element,
represented by Etienne, believed that this could be done through
a mixture of direct action in Morocco and diplomatic efforts
for closer commercial links between France and Germany. As
a consequence of both these “pro-German” positions there
emerged an impetus to encourage closer financial co-operation
with Germany. Also, there remained the more extreme elements
behind the ‘bureaux’ who advocated action in Morocco in
defiance of Germany in the full belief that should it result in
war, British support would be both forthcoming and adequate
to defeat Germany even in the absence of Russia.
Thus the way in which French politics expressed itself in
terms of Germany was not a simple one where the imperialists/
colonialists lined up on the anti side and the non-expansionists
lined up on the pro side. With regards to French policy on
Morocco the Algeciras agreement saw the decline of the
straight-forward anti-German position of Delcassé and the
‘bureaux’ and the rise of the more pragmatic approach of both
Clemenceau and Etienne—notwithstanding the differences
between them.
Clemenceau’s distrust of Britain.
The situation which the French colonialists had signed up
to regarding the advancement of French interests in Morocco
had been formulated on the basis of the long-standing alliance
with Russia (dating from 1892) and the more recent military
agreements with Britain arising from the Entente Cordiale of
1904. However, at this stage there was no Triple Entente as
Britain had not yet signed an alliance with Russia to complete
the triangle (the Anglo-Russian alliance was not signed until
31 August 1907). This created a sense of apprehension among
certain elements of the French imperial bloc. Russia had
traditionally been viewed as Britain’s great enemy and the
prospect of her making common cause with Russia even for
the sake of France was something that was the basis of ongoing
anxiety among these elements. After 1905, with Russia’s
18
potential military contribution taken out of the equation for
several years, the belief or otherwise in Britain’s will and
capacity to provide effective military assistance became all the
more critical in influencing the direction of French politics.
All of which presented Clemenceau with a dilemma. A
revolutionary in his youth, Clemenceau lived for a while in the
U.S. and married an American citizen (they later divorced). He
was also the editor and owner of the newspaper that published
Emile Zola’s J’Accuse in response to the Dreyfus scandal.
Clemenceau became Minister of the Interior in the left-wing
coalition Cabinet under Ferdinand Sarrien in the aftermath of
the fall of the Rouvier government in March 1906. Discarding
his radical background, in his position as Minister of the Interior
he reformed the police and authorised repressive policies
against the workers’ movement. He became Prime Minister
of France as a result of the resignation of Sarrien in October
1906 having established himself as the strong man of French
politics in opposition to the workers’ and socialist movement.
The circumstances of his defeat in the Chamber on 20 July
1909 and his subsequent resignation will be gone into later but
he was again Prime Minister between 1917 and 1920. He was
a staunch Anglophile with many contacts among the English
establishment and, like many French politicians, he retained a
desire to avenge what he saw as the French humiliation of 1871.
In short, he was a politician with no apparent reason to reach
an accommodation with Germany. Yet, as we will see, it was on
his watch that the groundwork was laid for an agreement with
Germany that almost thwarted the British Liberal Imperialists’
plans for war.
Clemenceau’s wish was that France had the freedom to
pursue her own agenda in Europe without having to steer a
course between the two most powerful countries, one with the
most powerful army and the other the most powerful navy. Yet,
he was a realist politician who recognised his country’s position
within the evolving European hostilities. As a result, his efforts
to maintain good relations with Germany carried with it the
danger of alienating Britain and his task involved him walking a
tightrope between British and German sensibilities and negating
as far as possible the domestic influence of Delcassé’s ‘bureaux’
as well as the position represented by Etienne’s colonial party.
He believed that the Entente Cordiale with Britain could prove
to be a real danger to France (see H. A. L. Fisher, A History
of Europe. Published by Edward Arnold Ltd., London, 1957.
p.1076). As far as he was concerned, the loss of Russia as an
effective military ally after 1905 was a real disaster for France
and one for which the Entente with Britain could offer no
compensation:
“The Anglo-French entente offered no substitute, for even if
British help were forthcoming, the military strength of Britain
was insignificant and her navy would be of little use to France
in withstanding what was expected to be the decisive first
shock of war. Germany held the key both to Morocco and to
the security of France herself, and only with German consent
could French ambitions be realized without another dangerous
crisis.” (The Franco-German Agreement on Morocco, 1909, by
E. W. Edwards, in The English Historical Review, Vol. 78, No.
308, July 1963, p. 487).
Although finding himself needing to maintain good relations
with Germany for the sake of his Moroccan aims and in order
to neutralise the challenge posed by the Etienne grouping he
could not afford any accommodation with Germany which
upset Britain.
Fisher and Lansdowne had earlier, during the first Moroccan
crisis, promised Delcassé the use of the British Navy against
Germany and the landing of troops in Schleswig-Holstein in the
event of war. However, Clemenceau rightly calculated that what
was required was the presence of British troops on French soil
in sufficient numbers to successfully confront the German Army
but at the time that Clemenceau came to power in 1906 and for
some years afterwards he remained unconvinced that even such
a commitment from Britain would be sufficient to compensate
for the loss of Russia as a military ally. It was only when Russia
began to recover from the military and social setbacks from
the Russo-Japanese war that the wider imperialist community
in France began once more to reinvest in the prospect of a war
with Germany. In the meantime however, there remained the
uncertainty—an uncertainty added to by the ignorance among
leading British politicians of the secret war agenda:
“Disquiet in Paris, however was not without reason and by no
one was it felt more acutely than by Clemenceau who made the
military aspects of the entente a persistent theme in his meetings
with British ministers. Something of his apprehension as to the
uncertainty and inadequacy of British military action in support
of France had emerged in and following his conversation with
Campbell-Bannerman in Paris in 1907. A year later at a time
when Anglo-German tension seemed to bring nearer a conflict
from which France as the friend of Britain could not hope
to escape and in which she would suffer heavily unless she
were given adequate British assistance, he again opened the
subject at Marienbad to King Edward and Goschen, the British
ambassador in Vienna to whom he said,
‘. . . once let our people realise, as I do, the price
which France may probably have to pay for England’s
friendship, if her military resources are allowed to
remain as they are now, and away goes the Entente,
away the men who promoted it and away go the
friendly feelings which are so much advantage to both
countries.’ (Clemenceau to Pichon, 29 August 1908)
A report from Huguet, the military attaché in London, in
November when the international situation had become critical
could have done nothing to remove the disquiet in Paris. Huguet
had had an important conversation with Lord Esher from which
two significant points emerged. In the first place Esher, though
himself believing that in the event of a conflict Britain would
intervene on the side of France, confirmed what the French
already knew: that there was still division in the Cabinet on
the very principle of intervention which the radicals, led by
Churchill, would probably oppose. Secondly, the Committee of
Imperial Defence was split between the blue-water school and
the advocates of land war, so that with the essential strategic
questions undecided there was no possibility of effective British
intervention in the event of a continental war developing rapidly,
even if the Cabinet were ready to approve it.” (As reported
in Paul Cambon to Pichon, 18 November 1908 and cited in
Edwards, op. cit., p.498-499). [Note:- Paul Cambon was the
French Ambassador to Britain and the brother of Jules Cambon,
French Ambassador to Germany. Paul. Stephen Pichon was the
French Foreign Minister - ED.]
As has been shown earlier, the significance of the differences
within the Committee of Imperial Defence between the bluewater school and the advocates of a land war were seriously
exaggerated and there is no need to revisit that issue. The
references to Churchill as leader of the radicals likely to oppose
any intervention by Britain on the side of France may have been
true in 1908 but both he and Lloyd George, the other leading
radical who were supposed to be sympathetic to Germany’s
position, within the year had switched sides after they were
brought into the Liberal Imperialist fold. As we will see later
the fact that Lloyd George and Churchill were welcomed into
Asquith’s inner circle was one event in that fateful period 19091910 which witnessed several developments that represented
the change in climate caused by what was happening in French
politics. The conversation between Clemenceau and CampbellBannerman referred to in the above quote revealed the extent to
which Liberal Imperialist plans had been concealed even from
their own Prime Minister:“Exactly how little Campbell-Bannerman knew concerning the
talks he had authorized became embarrassingly clear in April
1907. French premier Georges Clemenceau made the logical
but incorrect assumption that his English guest had approved
the joint staff plan to send the BEF to northern France and
expressed the hope that recently announced cuts in British
military estimates would not compromise its ability to perform
this mission. A horrified Campbell-Bannerman replied that
British public opinion would never permit the BEF to be used
in such a Continental operation, joint plan or no joint plan. Grey
later persuaded the prime minister to withdraw this categorical
veto and substitute an ambiguous statement reaffirming the
nonbinding character of the staff talks but leaving open the
possibility that a wartime British government might at some
future time approve dispatch of the BEF to France. The real
significance of the incident was its revelation of CampbellBannerman’s complete ignorance of the Continental focus of
the contacts he had authorized in January 1906.” (The British
Cabinet and the Anglo-French Staff Talks, 1905-1914: Who
Knew What and When Did He Know It?, by John W. Coogan
and Peter F. Coogan. Published in The Journal of British
Studies, Vol 24, No. 1, January 1985, pp.115-116).
Grey was somewhat disingenuous to inform CampbellBannerman that the plans for a British expeditionary force only
remained a ‘possibility that a wartime British government might
at some future time approve’ when such plans had already been
formulated and under constant review in both countries. This
evidence of ignorance of the Liberal Imperialist war plans at
the very highest levels of the British Government could not but
have added to Clemenceau’s sense of uncertainty and distrust.
As late as 1909 Clemenceau remained suspicious of British
motives. In a conversation with Alexander Iswolsky, Russian
Foreign Minister:“Clemenceau told Iswolsky at Carlsbad on 24 August 1909 that
he feared that in the event of an Anglo-German war Germany
would fall on France while Britain, safe behind her sea wall
would let the Germans exhaust their strength in Europe while
she gained Germany’s trade and colonies.” (Edwards, op. cit.,
footnote p.509).
At the time of his meeting with Iswolsky in August 1909,
Clemenceau had resigned as Prime Minister but he was
obviously aware of the plan idéal that motivated British
thinking. The fact that subsequent developments compelled
them to abandon that plan in no way takes from the accuracy of
Clemenceau’s estimation in 1909. Before he resigned in 1909
he had come to an agreement with Germany—an agreement
which revealed the extent to which he was hedging his bets on
the future relationship between France and Britain and which in
turn was to cause real disquiet among France’s British allies.

19
‘Emergency Czechmate’ or Wartime Dialogue?
Dev, the ‘Irish Institute’ and the Masaryk Affair
by Manus O'Riordan
In the March 2013 issue of Irish Foreign Affairs Jack Lane
writes: “The Institute of International and European Affairs
(IIEA) [formerly the Irish Institute of European Affairs –
MO’R] is the Irish imitation of Chatham House [the Royal
Institute of International Affairs; formerly the British Institute
of International Affairs 1920-26 – MO’R]. It is the nearest thing
the Government has to a think tank about major international
issues.” But the self-styled, if similarly named, Irish Institute
of International Affairs, operating in wartime Ireland, most
certainly did not act as a think tank for the Government. Or,
perhaps I should be more precise. It did not provide any service
whatsoever as far as the Irish Government was concerned,
whatever about serving the needs of a British Government
at war. In a Dáil debate on 9 November 1944, the Taoiseach,
Éamon de Valera, pointed out:
“It is well that the position of this body calling itself the
Irish Institute of International Affairs, and the character of its
activities, should be generally known. I am informed that this
body was first set up in 1936, following a visit to this country
of the Secretary of the Royal Institute of International Affairs
in Britain. The British Institute of International Affairs is, of
course, well known. It is a body which commands considerable
respect and authority in Britain and other countries. It is a
body founded by royal charter and the terms of its charter
provide just those safeguards as regards the non-party political
nature of its activity, and the objective character of its work
and publications, which have given the British Institute the
authority which it enjoys in the eyes of serious students of
international affairs. No one, for example, could conceive of
the British Institute participating in the politics of the day, or
conducting propaganda against the foreign policy of the British
Government in power. Much less can one imagine the British
Institute, without the knowledge of the British Government or
the Foreign Office, inviting members and officials of foreign
Governments to come to London to attend meetings at which
matters affecting the British foreign policy of the day would
be discussed and speeches hostile to, or critical of, that policy
would be made. If the British Institute did that sort of thing, it
would soon lose the position which it holds to-day. It would be
regarded, and quite rightly so, as a focus of propaganda and
as a body whose activities were harmful to British relations
with other countries and to British interests generally. But, of
course, the British Institute does not do anything of the kind.
In time of peace, its studies and publications are objective and
authoritative as to statements of fact, carefully avoiding, in
accordance with the charter, expressions of opinion on current
international affairs. In time of war, as is the position at present,
the British Institute works in close association with, and indeed
in certain respects, under the actual control of the British
Foreign Office.”
“Now, let us turn to the so-called Irish Institute of International
Affairs. I make the contrast between the two bodies for two
reasons – firstly, because, as I say, the Irish Institute was set
up following a visit of the Secretary of the British Institute
in 1936, and, secondly, because owing to the circumstances
and the similarity of the titles of the two bodies, people, and
20
particularly foreigners, are apt to draw the conclusion—and in
actual cases have drawn the conclusion—that the Irish Institute
is a body of the same character and standing as its British
counterpart—that it is a regularly constituted institute with
objects similar to those of the Royal Institute of International
Affairs; that official safeguards have been provided for the nonparty political and objective character of its work similar to
the safeguards provided in the royal charter in England; that
if it does not work in actual association with the Department
of External Affairs here, as the British Institute works with the
Foreign Office in London, at least that it is careful not to place
itself in a position of conflict with its own Government, and
that, therefore, when it issues an invitation to a member of a
foreign Government or foreign diplomat to address one of its
meetings, the invitation can be accepted in the assurance that,
when the person invited arrived in this country, he would find
that his visit was known beforehand to the Irish Government
and welcomed by it.”
“It is well that the facts about this so-called Irish Institute of
International Affairs should be known. First of all, it is not a
chartered body. It has no kind of official recognition or approval.
Indeed, it has no legal existence whatever, and the title ‘Irish
Institute of International Affairs’ is simply self-assumed.
Having no legal existence, it is subject to none of the legal
safeguards with regard to the character of its activities which are
provided in the case of the British Institute in its charter… I am
satisfied beyond all doubt, from the information at my disposal,
including complaints which I have received from members of
the organisation itself, that, far from making the slightest effort
to preserve the character which a body of this kind should have
if it is to be of any public service, the Irish Institute has become
a focus of propaganda devoted entirely to furthering and
encouraging a particular point of view in relation to the present
war. One would think that, however they might feel individually,
those holding office in the institute would refrain, out of simple
patriotism and regard for the democratically expressed wishes
of our own people, from attacking this country's position in
relation to the war in the presence of foreigners. There is
enough misrepresentation of the policy of the Irish people in
relation to the present conflict without vice-presidents of a body
masquerading under a title which suggests that it is concerned
with the objective and fact-finding study of international affairs,
getting up in front of foreigners and providing ammunition for
people abroad who wish to say that neutrality is a policy forced
by the Irish Government on an unwilling people. If you have
a body genuinely concerned with the study of international
affairs, it is natural that from time to time it will wish to invite
foreigners—members of foreign governments and foreign
diplomats—to speak at its meetings. Now, I am not arguing
that an institute of that kind—provided always, of course, that
it was properly organised—should be actually associated with
the Foreign Office in the conduct of its work in peace time.
The arrangement in England at the moment is a temporary one
and will hardly continue after the war. But it is quite a different
question to have, in a war situation, a body using a title which
gives a wholly misleading idea as to its status and the nature
of its activities, going over the head of its own Government in
a time of danger and without their knowledge or without any
prior notification to them, issuing invitations to members of
foreign governments and foreign officials asking them to come
to this country and attend meetings at which speeches attacking
the Government of this country and the policy adopted by the
Irish people as a whole are made. That is precisely what this
institute has made a practice of doing, and it is a practice which
no Government worthy of the name would tolerate.”
What, then, should we make of the Irish government’s
November 1944 refusal to permit the Czechoslovak Foreign
Minister in London Exile, Jan Masaryk, address a meeting
of the “Irish Institute of International Affairs” in Dublin? An
“emergency czechmate” is how that decision might be caricatured
by today’s revisionist historians who pretend that the Irish
government sought to deny the World War’s existence by calling
it the Emergency, when in fact the latter term was only used by
the government to characterise the domestic measures required
in the context of that war. See the Church and State editorial in
its first quarter 2013 issue for a refutation of Professor Brian
Girvin’s 2006 book—entitled The Emergency—in that regard.
Not alone did the Irish government unequivocally characterise
the World War as such, de Valera himself publicly sympathised,
as we shall see, with the Czechs as a victim nation in that war.
But it was quite another matter to try and manipulate public
sympathy for the Czech predicament in order to undermine this
Republic’s neutrality and its firm determination to avoid being
dragged into that war. In his 1996 book, Censorship in Ireland,
1939-1945: Neutrality, Politics and Society, Dónal Ó Drisceoil
provided some, if limited, context:
“The propaganda activities of the various legations were
constantly monitored… A Czech propaganda bulletin, issued
periodically, was allowed so long as ‘discretion’ was used in its
circulation...… The putting over of British propaganda themes in
neutral countries was principally the task of the press attachés...…
Visiting lecturers were ‘always considered to be an important
propaganda channel’; the most useful medium for the British
in that regard was the Irish Institute of International Affairs.
While its lectures and meetings were not given wide coverage
in the press, the propagandist intention was to appeal to the
‘influential few’ who would attend. Among those who lectured
to members of the Institute [was]... … Professor Henry Steele
Commager, an American historian who lectured in Cambridge
during the war … [and who] took the opportunity of his visit to
Dublin to write a long indictment of Irish neutrality for the
New York Times magazine. G2 (Irish military intelligence)
monitored the activities of the institute; one report noted
that ‘while Neutrality is paid lip service as being Government
policy, the bulk of the audience at these meetings were proBritish in sentiment’...… By 1943 the government’s tolerance
of the institute’s activities began to diminish...… On 15 June
...… External Affairs informed the institute that: “There are
difficulties about bringing foreigners into this country for the
purpose of giving lectures, and it would perhaps be better to
consult the Department before issuing invitations in future”.
The failure to follow this procedure was used to justify the
controversial banning of a lecture to the institute by Dr Jan
Masaryk, deputy prime minister and foreign minister of the
Czech government in exile, in October [sic] 1944. As Masaryk
was already in the country and had shared a platform with de
Valera at a meeting of the Trinity College Historical Society a
few days previously, the case inevitably generated controversy.
In his reply to charges made by Patrick McGilligan (Fine Gael)
in the Dáil (9 November), de Valera made clear that the target
of the government’s action was the institute and not Masaryk.
He took the opportunity to declare it ‘a focus of propaganda
devoted entirely to furthering and encouraging a particular
point of view in relation to the present war”. He further
accused the institute of creating “a succession of difficulties
and embarrassment, positively harmful to our relations with
other Governments and to the impression of this country which
we would wish them to have”. As an example he cited a meeting
held arising out of the Masaryk ban to which the diplomatic
corps were invited, only to find themselves “attending an
organised protest against the action of the Government”, thus
bringing the latter into disrepute and creating embarrassment
for it in its external relations. The Censorship played its part
in the episode by suppressing all press notices announcing the
voidance of the meeting. The Irish Times was stopped on three
successive days from drawing attention to ‘l’affaire Masaryk’
…” (pp 146-149).
Ó Drisceoil was being far too kind to the Irish Times and
its Empire Loyalist editor, R. M. Smyllie. Masaryk had shared
that platform with de Valera in Trinity College on November 1st.
The next day’s Irish Times report of their respective addresses,
which will be reprinted in the next issue of IFA, was published
free of any censorship of the speakers’ references either to
the World War or to Czech wartime suffering. But when the
‘Institute’ tried to stage its own Masaryk event two days later, it
did so without the slightest reference to the Irish government.
In the aforementioned Dáil debate, de Valera further explained
how this ‘Institute’ behaviour was of a pattern—and showed
such wartime contempt for Irish neutrality—that it could not be
tolerated by any self-respecting government:
“It is an obvious and well-recognised principle that when a
Minister of the Government of one State is invited to address a
group of citizens within the territory of another, the Government
of the latter State should be informed beforehand and afforded
an opportunity of expressing its assent. The principle applies
even in time of peace, not merely as a matter of courtesy, but
for the good reason that it makes for the avoidance of possible
domestic incidents in which a Minister of another country
would naturally wish not to be involved and which might
conceivably embarrass the external relations of the State. In
time of war, there are obviously still stronger reasons for the
principle being adhered to with scrupulous care. It could never
be said that the delivery of a lecture by a Minister of one State
to a group of citizens in the territory of another is so much a
matter of indifference to those responsible for the conduct of
the foreign relations of the latter State as to make it immaterial
whether they are informed or consulted. It is a question for
the Government of the country concerned, acting on behalf
of the Parliament and people, to say whether it is wise that
such a lecture should be given. In the case referred to in these
questions, no notice or request was received from the group
of citizens that issued the invitation. They were a group which
could scarcely have been ignorant of the correct procedure,
but they proposed to ignore the Government. The position
was explained to the Czech Consul [Karel Kostal – MO’R], to
whom it was officially intimated that, in the circumstances, the
Government did not wish the lecture to be given. The Consul
understood the position and took the appropriate action. Three
Press notices, apparently supplied by the group in question,
were received by the Censor from the Irish Times newspaper
for insertion in its issues of the 2nd, 3rd and 4th November.
They were deleted by the Censor, because they contained halftruths and other matter calculated to create misunderstanding
between this country and a friendly State… The fact was that
Dr. Masaryk, being a man of experience, knew what would be
proper in a case like this. When coming into a neutral State as
the representative of a belligerent State, he knew what would
21
be proper, and did not go beyond the bounds of what would be
proper.”
De Valera appreciated Masaryk’s statesmanship in that
regard and he chose to draw a line under the fact that he had
good cause for complaint regarding the mischievous activities
towards Ireland that had been indulged in by Masaryk’s
subordinate in Dublin some years previously. At the close of
the War, the British espionage agency MI5, in its own Note on
the Work of the Irish Section of the Security Service 1939-1945,
recorded:
“A report dated 20th July (1939) was received through the (UK)
Foreign Office which came from the Czech Consul in Dublin
[Karel Kostal – MO’R] that, on that date, the German Minister
[Eduard Hempel – MO’R] with three members of the Nazi Party
had left Dublin for a personal meeting with the leaders of the
IRA at Inver, Co Donegal. … and further that General O’Duffy,
former leader of the Blue Shirts, a para-Fascist organisation in
Ireland, had also been responsible for the arrangements… This
information was passed on to the Dublin link, who confirmed
that the Drombeg Hotel at Inver was owned by an old German
national … and that two of the German officials mentioned in
the report … had been staying there. It was thought unlikely
that the IRA would attend such a large meeting in an out of
the way place where it would certainly attract attention, and
though O’Duffy was known to be pro-German and pro-Fascist,
it was considered unlikely that the IRA would cooperate with
him. In August a report was received from the same source
that Dr Hempel was in touch with Henry Francis Stuart and his
brother-in-law, Sean MacBride, on the question of organising
an Irish legion to fight for Germany against Britain. [See
Irish Political Review, May 2013, for my refutation of the
“pro-Nazi” allegations levelled against MacBride by Trinity
College Professor Eunan O’Halpin – MO’R]. This information
was passed to the Dublin link, and they were informed that
the source was a Czech servant in the German Legation. This
information reached (Ireland’s) Secretary of External Affairs,
Joe Walshe, who informed the (UK) Dominions Office that the
source was utterly unreliable. Later, a report was received from
the Dublin link saying he thought the information was poor
and that Walshe spoke of the informant as a ‘villainous type’.
He added that the Eire police had received their information
about the Inver meeting between the Germans and the IRA
from a newspaper editor in Dublin [Was it Smyllie of the
Irish Times? – MO’R] who was known to be a friend of the
Czech Consul, Dublin… There is little doubt that Joe Walshe
feared that the Czech informant in the German Legation might
prove embarrassing to the Eire Government, and though, in
this case, it is doubtful whether the information of the meeting
with the IRA at Inver was correct, he did his best to discredit
the informant in the eyes of the British, and it is believed,
later informed the German Minister, who sacked him.” (MI5
and Ireland 1939-1945 – The Official History, edited and
introduced by Professor Eunan O’Halpin, 2003, pp 43-44).
If de Valera had grounds for complaint about Masaryk’s
subordinate in Dublin, Karel Kostal, he had more substantial
grounds for contempt regarding his superior, Edvard Beneš.
In 1935, two years prior to his death, the first President of
Czechoslovakia, Jan’s father Thomas Masaryk, retired on
grounds of ill-health. Beneš, who had been Masaryk’s righthand man and served as his Foreign Minister 1918-35, now
went on to serve as Czechoslovakia’s second President 1935-38,
President of its Government-in-Exile in London 1940-45, and
once again state President during the all-Party Czechoslovak
government of the immediate post-war years 1945-48. Jan
22
Masaryk, in turn, served under Beneš as Ambassador to the
UK 1925-38 and Foreign Minister 1940-48. De Valera had
found the foreign policy activities pursued by Beneš in 1935
to be particularly reprehensible. On 23 July 1935 Ireland’s
Permanent Representative to the League of Nations, Francis T
Cremins, reported from Geneva on the Italo-Abyssinia dispute
to the Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, Joseph
P Walshe:
“Here, feeling appears to be almost wholly against the Italian
adventure, both from the point of view of the injustice of the
thing itself and its effects on the League, as well as its disastrous
possibilities on the general European situation. It is feared, for
example, that Italian difficulties and new interests may result
in Germany having a free hand in Austria, notwithstanding
the present Italian assertions in this matter, and it is even
considered possible that Japan may take advantage of troubled
conditions in Europe to proceed with her designs against China,
or even against Russia… There is a good deal of criticism at
Geneva of those States which have bowed to Italy's demand
for an embargo on the supplies of arms to Abyssinia. Belgium,
Czechoslovakia, Denmark and France, for example, are stated
to have prohibited the export of arms to that country.” [My
emphases – MO’R. See www.difp.ie to download this and the
other documents quoted below].
De Valera held the offices of both President of the Executive
Council of the Irish Free State (pre-1937 Constitution) and
Minister for External Affairs, and in the course of contemporary
Irish diplomatic correspondence he could be referred to either
as the President or the Minister. On 22 August 1935 Cremins
further informed Walshe of Geneva press coverage of Dev’s
stated intention to get the League of Nations to take a firm
stand against Fascist Italy’s aggression against Ethiopia (aka
Abyssinia):
“The note which appeared in the Irish Press of the 19th August
as to the Minister's attitude towards the dispute has been sent to
some of the Geneva papers by the Havas agency and reproduced
under the title 'L'Attitude de l'Irlande'. The note indicates that
the Minister has decided to attend the Assembly in order to state
there the Irish point of view in regard to the dispute, and that
he will indicate that his Government is disposed to cooperate
entirely with the League in the efforts which the latter will make
in order to safeguard peace and the independence of Ethiopia.”
[My emphases – MO’R].
There was widespread expectation that de Valera would
be elected to the office of President of the League of Nations
Assembly at that session, and through that office, be all the better
positioned to pursue Ireland’s foreign policy of opposition to
such Fascist aggression. The France of Pierre Laval, however,
was conniving at Italy’s imperialist ambitions to conquer
Abyssinia, and countered Dev by advancing the ambitions of
Czechoslovak Foreign Minister Beneš, who was more than
willing to play the French imperialist game in that regard, and
a few other imperialist games to boot. On 10 September 1935
the Head of the League of Nations Section of the Department of
External Affairs, Frederick H Boland, reported to Walshe:
“The principal matter which confronted us on arrival was the
question of the presidency of the Assembly. The President's
name had been freely mentioned during the previous four
or five days, but the day before our arrival Mr. Cremins had
been informed by a member of the Australian Delegation that
there was some talk of electing Dr Beneš, on the ground that
as President Masaryk was likely to die during the year, and
as Beneš would probably succeed him, this was likely to be
Beneš's last time at the Assembly. It soon became apparent,
however, that there were more concrete reasons for Beneš's
candidature. It became obvious, in fact, that certain interests
were anxious to have in the presidential chair a man who
could be relied upon to suppress discussion in the Assembly
if that course became necessary in the interests of what certain
delegations conceived to be the proper conduct of the current
Italo-Abyssinian negotiations. The interests behind Beneš were
principally the Secretariat and the French Delegation… The
extent to which the British supported Beneš and opposed the
President is not yet clear… We have more than a suspicion
that whether or not the British were actively (as opposed to
passively) working against us, the Czechoslovak Delegation
exploited existing Anglo-Irish differences with a view to
leading other delegations to believe that by voting for the
President they would be committing an unfriendly act against
Britain…The position on Saturday was therefore that the
spontaneous movement which had got up in favour of the
President was momentarily checked by the appearance of a
new candidate, namely Dr Beneš, backed by the big Powers
and the League Secretariat… We found that a rumour was
being systematically circulated in the Assembly to the effect
that the President had retired and that Beneš was therefore the
only candidate. It seemed impossible to overtake this rumour
which was calculated to have a most deleterious effect on the
President’s poll. In these circumstances, the President decided
that he would not allow his name to go forward. Accordingly,
he went over to Beneš and told him that he was not a candidate,
taking advantage of the opportunity to give Dr Beneš some
straight talking on the subject of the manner in which elections
of this kind are managed here at Geneva. The election then took
place, Beneš receiving all but four votes… I am afraid it would
extend this report unduly if I were to attempt to describe the
present position with regard to the Italo-Abyssinian dispute…
A powerful effort is being made by what I may call the French
block to keep the matter outside the Assembly entirely.”
In the person of Beneš as the newly installed President of
the League of Nations Assembly, Masaryk’s Czechoslovak
state connived at smoothing the path for Fascist Italy’s war
of aggression against—and its subsequent subjugation of—
Ethiopia, all at the behest of Czechoslovakia’s most longstanding ally, France. If de Valera had given Beneš a piece of
his mind as to how he had “won” the job of League of Nations
President, a week later, on 16 September 1935, in his address
to the League of Nations Assembly, de Valera went on to as
good as tell Beneš to his face that, by giving the green light
to such fascist aggression, he was presiding over the League’s
own self-destruction:
“Mr. President, I come to this Tribune with a feeling of deep
sadness… for no one can avoid being affected by the contrast
between the high ideals and lofty purposes enunciated from this
platform in former years and the atmosphere of despair which
surrounds it today… The final test of the League and all that it
stands for has come. Our conduct in this crisis will determine
whether the League of Nations is worthy to survive, or whether
it is better to let it lapse and disappear and be forgotten. Make
no mistake, if on any pretext whatever we were to permit the
sovereignty of even the weakest State amongst us to be unjustly
taken away, the whole foundation of the League would crumble
into dust. If the pledge of security is not universal, if it is not
to apply to all impartially, if there be picking and choosing,
and jockeying and favouritism, if one aggressor is to be given
a free hand while another is restrained, then it is far better that
the old system of alliances should return and that each nation
should do what it can to prepare for its own defence. Without
universality, the League can be only a snare. If the Covenant
is not observed as a whole for all and by all, then there is no
Covenant.”
In 1944 de Valera was to publish this and other of his League
of Nations addresses over the years, under the heading of
Peace and the Emergency. I jest. The title of this wartime book
issued by the Irish Government was, in fact, Peace and War
– Speeches by Mr de Valera on International Affairs. I don’t
know if, in his heart of hearts, de Valera ever forgave Beneš for
such a slide towards the Second World War, but he did forgive
Beneš’s resident foot-soldier in Dublin, Karel Kostal. Under
the heading of “DR. MASARYK LUNCHES WITH MR. DE
VALERA”, the Irish Times reported on 3 November 1944: “At
Iveagh House, Dublin, yesterday, the Taoiseach, Mr. de Valera,
entertained to lunch Dr. Jan Masaryk, Foreign Minister in the
Czechoslovak Government in London. Those present included
the Tanaiste, Mr. Sean T. O’Kelly; Mr. Sean Lemass, Minister
for Supplies and Industry and Commerce and Dr. Karel Kostal,
the Czechoslovak Consul in Dublin.”
De Valera was to publicly express a very benign attitude,
not only towards Jan Masaryk himself, but also towards his
father, Thomas Masaryk, founder-President of Czechoslovakia
from 1918 to 1935. The inter-war Czechoslovak state had been
a construct of the World War One victors, Britain and France,
in the construction of which Masaryk and the other Czech
nationalist leaders were to break their promise to the Slovaks
that they would have autonomy therein. But Masaryk had
also bitten off more than he could chew for, quite apart from
the Slovaks, other national minorities (Germans, Hungarians,
Ukrainians, Poles and Jews) constituted as much as 34.3
percent of the population of inter-war Czechoslovakia, with the
Sudeten Germans alone constituting 23.4 percent. Yet Dev, in
his own way, continued to profess admiration for what Masaryk
had won for the Czechs, by hook or by crook. On 23 May 1947,
in welcoming back Karel Kostal as the post-war Czechoslovak
Minister to Ireland, on the occasion of the latter presenting
his diplomatic credentials, the Irish Times quoted de Valera as
saying:
“We, on our side, remember the part which the peoples [my
emphasis – MO’R] of Czechoslovakia played throughout the
centuries in upholding and vindicating the ideal of national
independence. We drew inspiration and courage from their
example in the dark hours of our own struggle, and the name of
Masaryk, which will always have so honourable a place in the
history of your country, is for us also a symbol of the ideal of
political and cultural freedom.”
Note, however, Dev’s usage of the “two nations” plural in
order to highlight his recognition of Slovaks as well as Czechs,
at variance with the “one nation” Czechoslovak dogmatism
of the Masaryks. Note also, from the 1944 Trinity College
dialogue, how Jan Masaryk referred only to Czechs but not
Slovaks. If Dev was not therefore a Masarykist regarding the
national question within Czechoslovakia, still less was he a
Marxist. The following example of contempt for both Czechs
and Slovaks, as expressed by Friedrich Engels in the Neue
Rheinische Zeitung of 15 February 1849, would, in turn, have
merited Dev’s own contempt:
“The Czechs, amongst whom we ourselves should like to
count the Moravians and the Slovaks, although they are
linguistically and historically distinct, never had a history.
Since Charlemagne, Bohemia has been bound to Germany. The
Czech nation emancipated itself for one moment and formed
the Great Moravian Empire, but was immediately subjugated
again and tossed back and forth like a football for five hundred
years between Germany, Hungary and Poland. Then Bohemia
and Moravia became definitively attached to Germany, and
the Slovak areas remained with Hungary. Is this ‘nation’, with
absolutely no historical existence, actually making a claim for
independence?”
23
But de Valera was being far too kind towards the memory
of Thomas Masaryk himself, for, as Dev knew all too well, the
Masaryk of 1916 had been anything but kind as he sneered at
the fate of Dev’s own close friend and comrade-in-arms, Roger
Casement. As W. J. Maloney had brought to public attention in
his 1936 comparative study, Traitor-Patriots in the Great War:
Casement and Masaryk:
“The tale of the lionising by the British Empire of Masaryk
the traitor to the Austrian Empire runs happily on until August
1916, when Masaryk records: ‘The pitiable Sir Roger Casement
was, at that moment, about to meet his fate.’ …” (The Belfast
Magazine edition, 2004, with a preface by Brendan Clifford,
p 7).
It can, however, be argued that de Valera’s May 1947 expression
of admiration for the name of Masaryk, and past Czechoslovak
struggles for independence from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,
should really be seen as a coded expression of solidarity with
Jan Masaryk’s post-war attempts to maintain a Czechoslovak
state somewhat independent of the Soviet Empire, a doomed
Masaryk project which would end in such ignominious failure
nine months later. In much the same way, when Jan Masaryk
had shared that Dublin platform with de Valera in November
1944, his own reference to “the nineteenth century Germanising
drive of the Austro-Hungarian Empire” can also be taken as a
coded reference to the then current Czech resistance to the Nazi
German Third Reich. But on that occasion de Valera did not
employ any code at all, but explicitly referred to Masaryk as
“a distinguished representative of another small nation, which
had suffered so cruelly in the war. He hoped that that country’s
agonies would soon be ended.” So much for the make-belief
of Irish academic revisionist history that Dev’s Emergency
measures were an attempt to pretend that the War did not exist!
The Irish Times and its Empire loyalist editor, R. M. Smyllie,
had little to complain of in terms of Irish wartime censorship of
the activities of Jan Masaryk. Ó Drisceoil’s expressed concerns
for that paper’s protests were quite misplaced. Dev’s censors
gave de facto recognition to the full reality of Belfast being
a wartime UK city—and consequently part of the Allied war
effort—when, under the heading of “FUTURE OF SMALL
NATIONS: CZECH DEPUTY PREMIER IN BELFAST”, it
permitted the Irish Times of 12 December 1942 to publish the
following front page report:
“Mr. Jan Masaryk, Deputy Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia,
received the honorary degree of Doctor of Law at Queen’s
University, Belfast, yesterday and afterwards said: ‘… AngloAmerican cooperation, together with the collaboration of
the Western democracies with Russia, are, to my mind, the
most important guarantees of a decent future for all of us. If
the British Commonwealth of Nations and the United States
of America will lead, we shall follow… Nations who, in the
hour of danger, preserve intact their people’s freedom are
those who shall dictate the peace of tomorrow.’ Earlier at a
Press conference, M. Masaryk said that … whoever expected
Germany to collapse without military defeat was an optimist…
The more ultra-nationalist separatism there was, the more
difficult a final peace settlement would be. Sovereignty had
become a very flexible entity.”
While Dev’s censor might permit the reporting of such a
Masaryk speech delivered in belligerent Belfast, the repeat
of such a speech from a platform in neutral Dublin could not
be facilitated. Yet that is precisely what the pro-British “Irish
Institute of International Affairs” had hoped to accomplish
when advertising that Masaryk would deliver a lecture
24
entitled “Czechoslovakia During and After the War”. But when
permission for such a lecture was refused, the censor nonetheless
allowed the Irish Times to publish, on 14 November 1942, a
lengthy, front page criticism of Dev’s action under the heading
of “Charges Against Institute ‘Unfounded’”. Furthermore,
under the heading of “Small Nations”, the following Irish
Times editorial from Smyllie had been previously given the
go-ahead on 3 November 1944, notwithstanding the fact that it
commenced with a self-serving British misrepresentation that
sought to establish an equivalence of German responsibility for
both World Wars:
“The immediate reason for the entry of Great Britain into the
last World War was Germany’s invasion of Belgium. From
that moment on, and particularly after the adherence of the
United States to the cause of the Entente, the rights of small
nations became the most widely-advertised of the Allies’ war
aims. During the present struggle less has been heard about
the rights of small nations. This time it was the invasion of
Poland that caused the British—and, incidentally, the French—
to declare war against the German Reich; and Poland, with
her considerable population and substantial resources, hardly
could be classified among the “small” Powers. Nevertheless,
from the very outset it has been obvious that this war will have
been waged in vain if the resultant settlement does not provide
in some way for the indefeasible right of the small nations,
numerically weak and lacking industrial strength, to carry on
their individual ways of life without fear of aggression from
their more powerful neighbours. Indeed, it is not too much to
say that the touchstone of the winning Powers’ sincerity will be
the way in which they deal with small countries when the war
is over. The subject was discussed on Wednesday night at the
opening meeting of the Historical Society in Trinity College,
Dublin. The Auditor was fortunate, inasmuch as his ‘platform’
included Mr. Eamon de Valera and Dr. Jan Masaryk, son of
the founder of the Czechoslovak State, who also was one of
the greatest democrats of modern times. The Taoiseach did not
seem to be very hopeful about the future. In his view, there
can be no real guarantee of world peace in the absence of a
‘World State’, which would include every nation, great and
small. Such a State would be served by an international police
force which would deal with potential aggressors as a civil
police force deals with the man who breaks a shop window. It
is a grandiose concept, reminiscent of Tennyson’s ‘Federation
of the world’; but Mr. de Valera is sufficiently realistic in his
outlook to recognise its utter impracticability. Dr. Masaryk was
not so gloomy as the Taoiseach. He holds that the small nations
have much to contribute to the common cause of civilisation,
but that they must depend still more upon spiritual, rather
than upon material, values. Small nations, in his opinion, can
survive and add their quotas to the sum of human happiness.
Dr. Masaryk believes, however, that for practical purposes they
must, in the nature of things, attach themselves to larger units.
Mr. de Valera argued that the original idea of the League of
Nations was preferable to the scheme that was been worked
out at present, inasmuch as the latter, in effect, implied a form
of dictatorship by the Great Powers. Dr. Masaryk said that the
preponderant strength of the Great Powers, who were bearing
the main brunt of the present struggle, need not cause any
concern to the small nations.”
“The future of the small nations is a matter of the greatest
interest to every good European. It is a problem complicated by
all sorts of racial, national, economic and religious difficulties;
but if it is not solved, the outbreak of another World War will
be merely a matter of time. There are many small nations in
Europe—for the moment we will ignore our own. Some of
them—such, for example, Sweden and Norway—present no
particular problem. They are homogeneous in respect of race,
and largely in respect of religion. Their national independence
virtually will guarantee itself in any reorganisation of European
society. Others are altogether different; and Czechoslovakia is
a case in point. Here, as in all the Balkan countries, the ugly
business of racial minorities continues to raise its head. The
State that was founded—or rather resurrected—by Thomas
Garrigue Masaryk had an extraordinarily mixed population.
Apart from the Czechs, who formed the bulk of the people,
and were in the ancient Hussite tradition, there were Slovaks,
Ruthenians, Magyars, and above all, a large proportion of
Germans who lived in what was known as the Sudeten territory.
The main difference between the Czechs and the Slovaks was
a matter of religion. The Slovaks are Catholics; just as devout
as the Poles. This difference also exists in Yugo-Slavia, where
the Serbs belong to the Orthodox Church, while the Croats are
staunchly attached to Rome. Between the two wars al these
small nations with minority problems suffered as a result of
what might be described as over-centralisation. Everywhere
the minorities had grievances, real or alleged, which were
exploited to the utmost by rival groups of Great Powers. The
Rumanians were accused of tyranny against the Magyars of
Transylvania. The Czechs were branded as persecutors not
only of the Sudeten Germans, but also of the Hungarians in
Slovakia, and even of the Slovaks themselves. In Yugo-Slavia,
where the minority problem has fantastic dimensions, the Serbs
were alleged to have deprived the Croats, Slovenes, Greeks,
Bulgars, Macedonians, and the rest of their inalienable rights;
and generally it was made painfully clear that the efforts of
the peace-makers after the last war to start the small nations
upon a career of guaranteed independence had been a dismal
failure. What will happen after this war? Now that the Red
Army is campaigning in the Balkans, as well as in Hungary
and Ruthenia, Russian influence in South-Eastern Europe
may be greater than ever it has been previously. Dr. Benes, on
behalf of the Czechoslovak Republic, has made a Treaty with
the Soviets, and, when Dr. Masaryk spoke of the support of
large units, he manifestly was thinking of this instrument in
relation to his own country. Much may depend everywhere
upon Russia’s attitude. The Atlantic Charter sounds almost as
well as President Wilson’s Fourteen Points sounded twenty-six
years ago; but it must be remembered that the Russians are not
bound by its terms. Actually, they are bound by nothing.”
Why, given the fact that Smyllie had commenced that
editorial with such blatant pro-British war propaganda, was
it passed for publication by the censors of a neutral Ireland?
Perhaps because de Valera appreciated its publication as useful,
in being an otherwise thoughtful, analytical editorial on the DevMasaryk dialogue, and the key issues raised by it. It portrayed
de Valera’s pessimism as being grounded in realism when
speaking of war and peace—a realism very firmly grounded,
indeed, on the cruel lessons Dev had absorbed from the League
of Nations’ self-destruction. Notwithstanding the revisionist
caricatures we are incessantly fed in respect of Dev, Smyllie
recognised that Masaryk was the one who had delivered the
airy fairy speech in Trinity. Smyllie’s concluding remarks
regarding Russia were also made in the light of the Irish Times
previously reporting on 23 October 1943: “Russia will be the
greatest continental Power after the war, according to Mr. Jan
Masaryk.” The Beneš/Masaryk objective of remaining half in
the Western camp and half in the Soviet bloc was pure selfdelusion, in more ways than one. In contrast to the other Eastern
European countries through which the Red Army had pursued
the USSR’s final defeat of Nazi Germany, the immediate postwar elections in Czechoslovakia had been freely conducted
and had produced an absolute parliamentary majority for
the Communist Party and its Social Democratic allies. The
attempt by the anti-Communist political parties to collapse the
Government in February 1948 came a cropper and resulted in
what is commonly referred to as the Communist coup, albeit a
coup popularly supported at the time. That was the end of Jan
Masaryk’s grand strategy. Whether or not he then committed
suicide, or was helped on his way out the window by either
Soviet or Czechoslovak secret police, the hard fact is that Jan
Masaryk had already committed political suicide.
But let us now return to Masaryk’s Dublin visit, and the proBritish attempt to hijack it. In the Dáil debate of 9 November
1944, de Valera concluded:
“I am charged with the responsibility for the conduct of the
foreign relations of this State. I find a body of this kind carrying
on propaganda against the declared policy of the country in
a time like this by using a self-assumed title, suggesting
that it has a status which it does not possess at all, inviting
members of foreign Governments and foreign diplomats over
here without the slightest reference to their own Government,
thereby creating difficulties and most regrettable incidents
between ourselves and other countries —it becomes my duty
in such circumstances to make as plain as I possibly can the
standing and character of this institute and the views which the
Government here has formed of its activities. That is precisely
what was done when the Institute's invitation to Dr. Masaryk
was made known to me some days before the proposed meeting.
The Deputy (McGilligan, FG) has tried to institute a contrast
with Trinity College meeting. There is a contrast: that all the
proper formalities were taken in the case of Trinity College.
These four or five gentlemen want to put themselves above
the Government. They think that they are the Government,
notwithstanding the decision of the people. As far as we are
concerned, that is not a situation that is going to be calmly
submitted to. We made clear our official view of this organisation
and expressed the wish that Dr. Masaryk should not accept the
invitation to address it. Dr. Masaryk adopted the course which
I or any other member of the Irish Government would naturally
have adopted if the positions had been interchanged and we
were visiting Czechoslovakia. I need hardly say that we have
the greatest possible respect for Dr.Masaryk in this country. It
was a great pleasure to us to welcome him here, and I regret
exceedingly that his visit should have been marred by this
matter, which, but for the unfortunate course of conduct which
the group controlling this institute have persistently chosen to
pursue, need never have arisen at all.”
The Irish Times report of the speeches by Dev and
Masaryk, will be reproduced in the next issue of
Irish Foreign Affairs.

Part 2 of:
Social Democracy and the Shaping of Germany, 1945-49 by Philip O’Connor is held
over for the next issue
25
Published by Elliott and Thompson, 18 Apr 2013.
Publishers’ Descripion:
In 2013 it is possible that Israel, backed by the United States,
will launch an attack on Iran. This would be a catastrophic event,
risking war, bloodshed and global economic collapse.
In this passionate, but rationally argued essay, the authors
attempt to avert a potential global catastrophe by showing
that the grounds for war do not exist, that there are no Iranian
nuclear weapons, and that Iran would happily come to the table
26
and strike a deal. They argue that the military threats aimed by
the West against Iran contravene international law, and argue
that Iran is a civilised country and a legitimate power across
the Middle East.
For years Peter Oborne and David Morrison have, in their
respective fields, examined the actions of our political classes
and found them wanting. Now they have joined forces to make
a poweful case against military action. In the wake of the Iraq
war, will the politicians listen?
A Dangerous Delusion: Why The West Got It Wrong about Nuclear Iran
by Peter Oborne and David Morrison
Interviews with David Morrison
Sunday Sequence, 21 April 2013, Radio Foyle and
BBC Radio NI
“William Crawley and guests debate the week's religious and
ethical news and explore the world of culture and ideas.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01s0zdv
William Crawley:
Just what is a rogue state? One that invades other countries
with noted regularity, claiming that it is for the greater good,
one that has large stocks of nuclear weapons, and repeatedly
makes noises that another intervention is imminent. Then, by
that criteria, wouldn’t this be an apt description for both the
United States and Britain? And yet it is Iran that has been in
the verbal firing line for quite some time, despite not having
invaded anywhere in the past two hundred years. So is Iran
really a risk, or is it a smoke screen, an excuse to exercise
control, and power, and implement regime change. I’ve been
speaking to David Morrison.
David Morrison:
I think the notion that Iran is an extremely aggressive state
is almost entirely a myth. Iran hasn’t attacked another state
in something like 200 years, and in November 2007 the US
Intelligence Agencies came to the consensus opinion that Iran
had not had a nuclear weapons programme since 2003, and every
year since then the US Director of National Intelligence has
reported to the US Congress that the situation hasn’t changed.
WC:
Yet we hear constantly across the media and across political
commentary about Iran’s nuclear weapons programme?
DM:
Well, certainly, it is never said that the US Intelligences
Services believe that Iran hasn’t got a nuclear weapons
programme. In addition, Obama has gone out of his way to
emphasise that Israel and the United States are close in terms of
military and intelligence co-operation, and he said that there is
little or no daylight between them in terms of the Iranian issue,
and we can reasonably conclude from this that Israel also knows
that Iran hasn’t got an active nuclear weapons programme.
WC:
We do know of course that Iran has a uranium enrichment
programme, because it has an ambition to develop nuclear
energy for civil use.
DM:
Yes. And that is its right under the NPT, the Non-proliferation
Treaty, under which states agreed not to develop nuclear
weapons, in exchange for which they would get assistance with
the development of nuclear technology for peaceful purposes.
WC:
One would get the impression from media presentations
and from political commentary that Iran is driving towards a
nuclear weapons programme, and indeed it is not prepared to
do business with the rest of the world, it has got its eyes fixed
on that. If someone reads your book they will learn that Iran
has offered a deal that would allow it to develop its atomic
energy potential, but which would possibly even put all of that
within an international consortium, so that there are checks and
balances, and so that there is clarity and transparency about the
fact that it is NOT developing a nuclear weapons programme.
That’s quite a proposal from Iran. Why was it turned down?
DM:
It was turned down because the United States does not want
Iran to have uranium enrichment.
WC:
Is that because the United States doesn’t trust President
Ahmadinejad, does not think he’s an honest broker, and is
concerned that if he gets any kind of enrichment for civil
purposes he will drive this in another direction and threaten
the world?
DM:
That may well be so, but it is Iran’s right under the NPT to
have enrichment, and what the United States is trying to do is
change the terms of an international treaty that both the United
States and Iran signed a long time ago.
WC:
We also learn from your book that the Supreme Leader of
Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, has described it as a great sin,
an unforgivable sin, for a country to own, to possess, nuclear
weapons.
DM:
That’s correct.
WC:
Which I thought was a remarkable statement to be made
within the context of the Iranian leadership.
DM:
Yes, that’s another matter that’s just not reported at all; I’ve
been aware of that since 2005.
WC:
They have a theological objection to nuclear weapons?
DM:
Yes. And in making that pronouncement he was following
the line of the founder of the Islamic republic, the Ayatollah
Khomeini. You’ve got to remember that Iran was subject to
chemical weapons during the Iran-Iraq war in the 80’s, and
even though it was in possession of materials that would have
enabled it to respond in kind, it chose not to. At the end of the
day, if Iran ever decides to get nuclear weapons, it will be the
Supreme Leader who takes that decision, and it seems to me
extremely unlikely that he will take that decision if he is, at
the same time, continually declaring that nuclear weapons are
un-Islamic. And indeed the only way that the Ayatollah could
be seen to change his mind on this is if something very bad
happened to the Islamic republic. For instance, if it was severely
attacked by the West; in which case he could reasonably argue
that he had changed his mind because that was the only way to
deter repetition. Those people who think that by bombing Iran’s
nuclear facilities they are going to stop Iran, it’s very likely it
will have the opposite effect, and will provoke them into getting
a nuclear weapon as soon as possible. Just like North Korea has.
The big lesson at the moment is that you don’t get threatened
with attack if you have even the most rudimentary nuclear
weapon. The United States does not talk about attacking North
Korea. And you know why – everybody knows why.
WC:
There are lots of ironies in this book, and a number of
examples of hypocrisy. Iran is signed up to the Non-proliferation
Treaty. Israel is not. Israel has, as far as we can tell, about 400
warheads of nuclear capability, and you describe in the book a
deal done between the United States and Israel, a deal simply to
not talk about that. Tell me more about that deal.
DM:
27
In the late 60’s, when the NPT came up for signature, first
of all the United States did its best to persuade Israel to sign
up to it. But Israel refused. And eventually Nixon came to an
arrangement with Israel and Golda Meir that Israel would not
reveal to the world that it HAD got nuclear weapons. And as
a result the United States would not EVER refer to them. The
United States today goes on interminably about Iran’s nuclear
weapons, and never mentions the fact that Israel has got lots of
them.
WC:
John Kerry, who is now the U.S. Secretary of State, is quoted
in your book as a critic of United States inflexibility.
DM:
I have not been able to detect any difference between the
Bush administration and the Obama administration, in either
his first or his second term, in regard to this. The central point
is this. If the West is prepared to accept that Iran has a right to
uranium enrichment for peaceful purposes, then a deal is easy.
It is not obvious that they are prepared to accept that. What we
show in our book is that, way back in 2005, Iran was prepared
to take extraordinary steps to reassure the world that its nuclear
programme was not for military purposes. It was turned down
then, and it’s a great pity indeed.
WC:
One of the problems – I’ll return to this – is the perception
that people have – the American leadership have – about
Ahmadinejad, is that he’s a madman. He cannot be trusted.
DM:
The thing is that clearly everybody who deals with Iran
knows that the person who makes major decisions on foreign
policy is the Supreme Leader. Furthermore, Ahmadinejad is
about to leave office, and elections are about to be held for the
Presidency. And there’s ample reason for believing that Iran is
prepared to do a reasonable deal about this issue. Back in 2005
they were prepared to go a great deal further. They were prepared
to limit the amount of enrichment they would do. The level to
which they were prepared to enrich – they were prepared to
extend beyond probably any other state in the world. And they
were kicked in the teeth.
WC:
Because they are not trusted? Or because of American power
in the region? What do you think?
DM:
I think one of the really most interesting things in the book
is that when President George Bush was told by his intelligence
services that Iran HADN’T got a nuclear weapons programme,
he says in his book he was angry, and he says it, quote, made it
more difficult for him to deal with Iran.
WC:
Inconvenient truth?
DM:
Yes. He thought he could no longer whip up antagonism
towards Iran and keep together a coalition that would keep
pressure on Iran.
WC:
What is the myth, beyond all other myths, David, that you
would love to crunch?
DM:
That Iran is an extremely aggressive state. Its historic record
is quite the opposite, and the evidence that it is hell bent on
getting nuclear weapons, it isn’t there! The intelligence services
of the West have been poring over Iran for 20 years, and they
have found more or less nothing! And I just can’t believe, that if
there was something there that was of importance regarding the
development of nuclear weapons, they would not have found
it by now.
28
WC:
That’s David Morrison, and he is co-author with Peter Oborne
of a fascinating new book which we’ve just been talking about
with him, A Dangerous Delusion: Why the Iranian Nuclear
Threat is a Myth, is published by Elliott and Thompson. And
what’s interesting about that book from our point of view is that
you don’t often hear that argument being made. He’s challenging
– they’re challenging – what is often seen as a kind of consensus
position, that Iran has a nuclear capability, it wants it, it is a
threat to the world, it is an aggressive nation. So if you want
to hear a different perspective to that often-stated perspective,
this new book offers a compelling and articulate form of that
argument. Not everyone agrees with it, of course. Many of the
American commentators claim that Iran is one of the world’s
most dangerous countries, if it’s not dealt with it could take
us into a third world war. Earlier this week the American Fox
News presenter and syndicated columnist Cal Thomas who
gave a lecture at Queen’s University about American Power
in the World, and afterwards I asked him just how dangerous
HE believes Iran is. [Use link above to hear that part of the
programme.]
News at One, BBC Radio 4, Thursday 18 April 2013
Martha Carney (Presenter, News at One):
Martha Carney:
[After playing an extract of an earlier interview with Benjamin
Netanyahu.] But the co-author of a new book argues that Israel
and the west have got it wrong about Iran. David Morrison’s
book is called A Dangerous Delusion: Why the Iranian Nuclear
Threat is a Myth. When he joined me along with Tom Wilson
from the Institute for the Middle Eastern Democracy a little
earlier, I asked him what had prompted his book.
David Morrison:
It is possible, that before this year is out, we will have a
situation where the US takes military action against Iran.
Hopefully it will not. It would be an absolute disaster for the
Middle East. We would have the situation where the United
States has taken action against a second Middle East country to
disarm it of weapons of mass destruction that it doesn’t actually
have!
MC:
There are strong views in the United States and Israel that
Iran is continuing to produce enriched uranium in order to
develop enriched uranium for nuclear weapons. Why do you
think that is not the case?
DM:
Well, US intelligence has said, since 2007, that Iran hasn’t
got an active nuclear weapons programme. A year ago the Chief
of the Israeli Defence Forces said, in an interview with Ha’aretz,
that in his opinion Iran hadn’t decided to make a bomb. He went
even further than that, he said he didn’t think they WOULD
decide to make a bomb.
MC:
What are your thoughts about that, Tom Wilson? A clear
view has been expressed that that Iran isn’t intending to make
nuclear weapons.
Tom Wilson:
I just find it so implausible that the United States, and
Israel, and the European Union believe that Iran doesn’t have a
nuclear weapons programme, and yet, at the same time, would
be imposing sanctions economically detrimental to themselves,
and if they were listening to their own intelligence agencies and
if their intelligence agencies really believe this. I just think there
are so many unanswered questions that the International Atomic
Energy Agency itself has flagged up. There are questions as to
why Iran as a state itself with rich reserves of natural gas and oil,
why in the world they would need a nuclear energy project, and
indeed, what Iranian personnel were doing at nuclear testing in
North Korea.
States ensured that, for the next twenty years or more, that Iran
couldn’t get access to nuclear technology. That is of course
breaking the NPT, because the great bargain in the NPT was
that those states that …
Specifically on the point as why does it NEED to develop a
civil nuclear energy programme.
DM:
MC:
DM:
It’s very strange why this question wasn’t asked whenever
America and Western Europe were supplying all sorts of nuclear
technology to the Shah, and were planning along with the Shah
for about 20 nuclear power stations. We should be applauding
them for not using up their carbon based energy. It is also about
Iran, to a certain extent, wishing to come into the modern world
and show that it has the capability to do other things that people
in the modern world do. By the way, it’s absolutely on the record,
in the public domain, that the US Intelligence Agency doesn’t
believe that Iran has a nuclear weapons programme. There’s
absolutely no doubt about this.
MC:
Tom Wilson.
TW:
That’s fine, but the UN Security Council must have its
concerns that it has these sanctions in place. When agents of
the International Atomic Energy Agency found that evidence
of uranium enriched up to 27 per cent in Iran, which is far
above the 20 per cent needed for civilian purposes, that has to
raise questions. Indeed, when Iran has tested ballistic missiles
with a long range capacity that would reach mainland Europe,
I think things like this are incredibly concerning. This is a
hostile regime which funds various proxies such as Hamas
and Hesbollah, sailed warships into the Mediterranean, it has
captured British naval personnel in 2007.
MC:
David Morrison
DM:
(Laughs) It’s very amusing to think that, apparently, Iran is
not allowed to sail ships on the high seas. This is ridiculous
nonsense. Surely every state in this world is allowed to have a
defence budget. And it’s a very small defence budget of about
10 billion dollars. It’s about a fiftieth of the United States’, it’s
about a quarter of Saudi Arabia’s just across the Gulf, it’s about
a quarter of Israel’s, and far from being this aggressive state it
has not attacked another state in 200 years!
TW:
I’m sure that people in this area would argue differently about
Iranian aggression given that it’s Iranian money that’s funding
Assad’s attacks on his own people, as indeed Iran has done the
same in shooting democratic protestors in its own country. I’m
surprised that David seems so flippant about this whole issue,
given Iran’s crimes against its own people.
MC:
This is the Non-proliferation Treaty …
Yes, the Non-proliferation Treaty. Those states that gave up
making nuclear weapons, that, in exchange, they would get
nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. Now, for twenty
years and more, Iran struggled to get any nuclear technology,
for instance even to re-fuel its research reactor in Teheran. The
United States stopped this happening all over the place. That is,
of course, why Iran went off to other places to buy technology
on the black market.
MC:
And, Tom Wilson, one of the arguments that is made in
the book is that the West got it wrong about weapons of mass
destruction when it came to Iraq, and isn’t it in danger of falling
into that trap again?
TW:
Well, I think that we should be very grateful in the Iraqi case
that Israel took out the nuclear reactor in Iraq so that we were
not facing a nuclear Iraq today and I think the situation we’re
facing in North Korea today – which of course is a nuclear state
– once the genie is out of the bottle it doesn’t go back again –
and we would be in a very much better situation today if we
weren’t facing a nuclear North Korea, and I very much hope we
won’t be facing the same situation with Iran.
MC:
Tom Wilson and David Morrison.
­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Reviews of the book can be found at:
Review: Peter Oborne is almost right about Iran's nonexistent nukes (Jonathan Rugman, Spectator, 11 May 2013)
Review: Myths and missteps , Norman Lamont, New
Statesman, 10-16 May 2013. “I wonder if Peter Oborne and
David Morrison know what is about to hit them. I fear that the
wrath of the neocons is about to descend upon them.”
Review, Daily Telegraph 27 April 2013. “The way to prevent
a nuclear Iran is by talking, argues Michael Axworthy. This
is a small book, but written with Peter Oborne’s characteristic
brutal clarity, it roars like the proverbial mouse.”
Plus a Tweet by Jon Snow @jonsnowC4
Why The West is Wrong About Iran: Have just read this
excellent and persuasive little book from Peter Oborne & David
Morrison
MC:
On the specific issue of the nuclear programme, doesn’t
it seem suspicious to you, David Morrison, that Iran kept its
uranium enrichment plant at Natanz secret?
DM:
In fact Iran did not break any rules by not revealing that it
had a uranium enrichment plant at Natanz.
MC:
It might not have broken an rules, but it seems suspicious.
DM:
Look, the situation was, during the Shah’s time, the United
States and states of Western Europe were happily in negotiations
with Iran about supplying nuclear technology. When the
Islamic revolution happened, that was all cut off. The United
Site for Athol Books Sales:
https://www.atholbooks-sales.org
Find out whatís new at:
http://www.atholbooks.org/whatsnew.php
29
A Pardon for Deserters - Letters
We publish a selection of letters putting the record straight,
as well as De Valera’s 1945 speech in reply to Churchill’s
accusations concerning Irish neutrality. The Minister for
Justice, Equality and Defence responsible for the pardon, Alan
Shatter, repeats Churchill’s accusations, and there is no better
answer to those accusations than the one that was given at the
time by De Valera.
Irish Times 14 May 2013
Sir, – For the generations born in Ireland since the end of
the second World War it is understandably difficult to envisage
the state of public opinion on the issue of Irish second World
War neutrality. To comment critically, as Minister for Justice,
Alan Shatter does (Home News, May 8th) on the morality of our
policy of neutrality during the war from the perspective of the
21st century is reading history backwards.
During the war years, the fallout from partition following
the Anglo-Irish conflict was still vivid in the public mind, and
it was just 17 years since the guns of the Civil War had fallen
silent and for both sides in the bitter internecine bloodbath the
British were still the common enemy. The decision of Dáil
Éireann to remain neutral in all probability avoided an outbreak
of a second civil conflict here. Mr Shatter seems to ignore the
fact that all political parties in the Dáil, and public opinion
outside, all favoured the policy of neutrality. Indeed just one
TD, James Dillon, voiced disapproval at our neutrality.
Even those Dáil members who were strong supporters of
the Allied cause, and there were many, voted to remain neutral.
Furthermore, proposals from prime minister Churchill in 1940
for the offer of a united Ireland as a quid pro quo for Irish entry
into the war was rejected by Éamon de Valera. Our sovereignty
and independence were not for sale.
With Irish soldiers now serving under British command in
Mali and some in Government calling for debate on Ireland’s
“moral imperative” to participate more fully in EU battle groups,
Irish neutrality is once again under attack. This time from
within. – Yours, etc,
TOM COOPER
Examiner. 9 May 2013
Dear Sir,
What a nation of self-loathers we have become. The Minister
for Justice and Defence Alan Shatter has issued a pardon, amnesty
and an apology for those Irish soldiers who deserted their posts
and enlisted with the Allied Forces during the Second World
(Irish WW II troops set for pardons, Irish Examiner, May 7th).
These soldiers were not free agents to make that choice, they
had given a legal and moral commitment to defend Ireland and
betrayed that commitment. By sanctioning this pardon minister
Shatter has rendered the Irish Defence Forces a joke.
As a non-belligerent neutral state during World War Two,
Ireland did not introduce a prohibition on her citizens opting
for foreign enlistment before or during the war, nor did
30
Ireland introduce conscription into her armed forces. Those
who joined the Irish Army had free choices before enlisting.
If these men had a conscientious objection to Irish neutrality
other options were open to them. The fact that they fought
against Nazism did not confer legitimacy on their actions. Most
of the Irish deserters joined the British army which itself had
executed in excess of 300 deserters during and following the
Great War and pursued relentlessly for decades those who had
deserted during the Second World War. There was no British
pardon for those deserters who betrayed the British parliament
and people. The actions of the Irish deserters imperiled Irish sovereignty.
British prime minister Winston Churchill had threatened to
"come to close quarters with Mr de Valera" over the Treaty Ports
and the Irish Army was duty bound to uphold and defend the
neutrality of this State, a neutrality endorsed not just by
government but by Dáil Éireann. The British War Cabinet had
considered violating Ireland's neutrality and seizing Irish ports
if it was perceived to be in Britain's interests. With a threat
of British or German invasion looming, for Irish soldiers to
abandon their sworn duty by desertion and enlistment in the
British army is, in my opinion, unpardonable and unforgivable.
Yours sincerely
Tom Cooper
• In the 1980s I did my inadequate best to defend a soldier
facing a court martial for desertion. The soldier (now deceased)
was convicted and dismissed "with ignominy". This precluded
him from any state employment. I will supply the particulars to
the minister on request.
This man surely deserves a pardon too, at least he did not
desert in wartime and enlist in an army that might very easily
have invaded his country.
Captain Padraig Lenihan (retired)
Dangan Upper, Galway
Letter in Irish Independent 10.5.13
http://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/letters/irishneutrality-was-noble-not-all-our-soldiers-were-230936.html
Irish neutrality was noble; not all our soldiers were
Saturday, May 11, 2013
Minister for Defence Alan Shatter said Irish war-time
neutrality was a “statement of moral bankruptcy”.
That is a precondition for the State to pardon deserters. Most
countries in Europe in 1939-45 declared neutrality (as did the
US) and only became involved in the conflict when they were
attacked. De Valera’s achievement — supported by all parties, the trade
unions and the majority of the population — was to maintain
neutrality, despite invasion threats. This was noble. Minister
Shatter said these men deserted “to fight Hitler”. But many were
sent to the fight the Japanese. Others were sent to the colony
garrisons, including India, where Ghandi and independence
leaders were jailed. Others deserted and never joined any army.
Many ‘served’ with the British beyond 1945 and participated
in their brutal operations in Greece, Burma, Kenya, Malaya,
Palestine and elsewhere. Is the pardon condoning those imperial
operations? Philip O’Connor
Opinion pieces.
Independent.ie, Opinion
Gerard O'Regan: Dev was right to stay neutral and demand
loyalty from troops
11 May 2013 in the Independent Gerard O'Regan wrote
an opinion piece entitled “Dev was right to stay neutral and
demand loyalty from troops.” in which he says:
“There is a context to what happened back in those times, and
this should have been acknowledged by the minister in much
more clearly worded language; such clarity and context would
help explain the attitude of the government in 1945 to those
who abandoned the Irish Army. Attitudes on topics such as this
are influenced most of all by the great divide between those
who believe Ireland was correct to remain neutral during World
War Two, and those who are convinced the country should have
fought with Britain and the allies.
Eamon de Valera had many flaws, most of all a dogged
insularity, but he was absolutely correct to maintain the
neutrality of the new Irish state, just 17 years old at the outbreak
of the war.”
Sat, May 11, 2013, Diarmaid Ferriter wrote a piece in the
Irish Times that began
“Denigrating neutrality during second World War has become
fashionable
Historical understanding of the Emergency has diminished
There has been much recent comment in relation to Ireland’s
controversial neutrality during the second World War that
suggests a diminishing rather than a deepening of historical
understanding.”
THE NIGHT MR. DE VALERA REPLIED TO CHURCHILL
All over Ireland on the night of 16 May 1945, people waited
expectantly beside their radios. In the streets traffic halted
and a strange quietness descended. All Ireland was waiting
to hear Taoiseach Eamon de Valera reply to the bitter attack
on Ireland's wartime policy of neutrality made by the British
Premier Winston Churchill in his Victory Speech following the
defeat of Germany.
After a short preamble in Irish and English, Mr. De Valera
spoke to and for his many thousands of listeners as follows:
"I have here before me the pencilled notes from which
I broadcast to you on 3 September 1939. I had so many other
things to do on that day that I could not find time to piece them
together into a connected statement. From these notes I see that
I said that noting the march of events your Government had
decided its policy the previous spring, and had announced its
decision to the world.
The aim of our policy, I said, would to keep our people out
of the war. I reminded you of what I had said in the Dail that
in our circumstances, with our history and our experience after
the last war and with a part of our country still unjustly severed
from us; no other policy was possible.
Certain newspapers have been very persistent in looking
for my answer to Mr. Churchill's recent broadcast. I know the
kind of answer I am expected to make. I know the answer that
first springs to the lips of every man of Irish blood who heard
or read that speech, no matter in what circumstances or in what
part of the world he found himself.
I know the reply I would have given a quarter of a century
ago. But I have deliberately decided that that is not the reply I
shall make tonight. I shall strive not to be guilty of adding any
fuel to the flames of hatred and passion which, if continued to
be fed, promise to burn up whatever is left by the war of decent
human feeling in Europe.
Allowances can be made for Mr. Churchill's statement,
however unworthy, in the first flush of his victory. No such
excuse could be found for me in this quieter atmosphere. There
are, however some things which it is my duty to say, some
things which it is essential to say. I shall try to say them as
dispassionately as I can.
Mr. Churchill makes it clear that, in certain circumstances,
he would have violated our neutrality and that he would justify
his action by Britain's necessity. It seems strange to me that
Mr. Churchill does not see that this, if accepted, would mean
Britain's necessity would become a moral code and that when
this necessity became sufficiently great, other people's rights
were not to count.
It is quite true that other great Powers believe in this same
code-in their own regard-and have behaved in accordance with
it. That is precisely why we have the disastrous succession of
wars-World War No. I and World War No. 2 and shall it be
World War No. 3?
Surely Mr. Churchill must see that if his contention
be admitted in our regard, a like justification can be framed
for similar acts of aggression elsewhere and no small nation
adjoining a great Power could ever hope to be permitted to go
it own way in peace.
It is indeed fortunate that Britain's necessity did not reach
the point when Mr. Churchill would have acted. All credit to him
that he successfully resisted the temptation which, I have not
doubt, may times assailed him in his difficulties and to which
I freely admit many leaders might have easily succumbed. It
is indeed; hard for the strong to be just to the weak, but acting
justly always has its rewards.
By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr. Churchill,
instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already
bloodstained record of the relations between England and this
31
country, has advanced the cause of international morality an
important step-one of the most important, indeed, that can be
taken on the road to the establishment of any sure basis for
peace.
As far as the peoples of these two islands are concerned, it
may, perhaps, mark a fresh beginning towards the realisation of
that mutual comprehension to which Mr. Churchill has referred
for which, I hope, he will not merely pray but work also, as
did his predecessor who will yet, I believe, find the honoured
place in British history which is due to him, as certainly he will
find it in any fair record of the relations between Britain and
ourselves.
That Mr. Churchill should be irritated when our neutrality
stood in the way of what he thought he vitally needed, I
understand, but that he or any thinking person in Britain or
elsewhere should fail to see the reason for our neutrality, I find
it hard to conceive.
I would like to put a hypothetical question-it is a question
I have put to many Englishmen since the last war. Suppose
Germany had won the war, had invaded and occupied England,
and that after a long lapse of time and many bitter struggles, she
was finally brought to acquiesce in admitting England's right to
freedom, and let England go, but not the whole of England, all
but, let us say, the six southern counties.
These six southern counties, those, let us suppose,
commanding the entrance to the narrow seas, Germany had
singled out and insisted on holding herself with a view to
weakening England as a whole, and maintaining the securing of
her own communications through the Straits of Dover.
Let us suppose further, that after all this had happened,
Germany was engaged in a great war in which she could show
that she was on the side of freedom of a number of small
nations, would Mr. Churchill as an Englishman who believed
that his own nation had as good a right to freedom as any other,
not freedom for a part merely, but freedom for the whole-would
he, whilst Germany still maintained the partition of his country
and occupied six counties of it, would he lead this partitioned
England to join with Germany in a crusade? I do not think Mr.
Churchill would.
Would he think the people of partitioned England an object
of shame if they stood neutral in such circumstances? I do not
think Mr. Churchill would.
Mr. Churchill is proud of Britain's stand alone, after France
had fallen and before America entered the War.
Could he not find in his heart the generosity to acknowledge
that there is a small nation that stood alone not for one year
or two, but for several hundred years against aggression; that
endured spoliation's, famines, massacres in endless succession;
that was clubbed many times into insensibility, but that each
time on returning consciousness took up the fight anew; a small
nation that could never be got to accept defeat and has never
surrendered her soul?
Mr. Churchill is justly proud of his nation's perseverance
against heavy odds. But we in this island are still prouder of
our people's perseverance for freedom through all the centuries.
32
We, of our time, have played our part in the perseverance, and
we have pledged our selves to the dead generations who have
preserved intact for us this glorious heritage, that we, too,
will strive to be faithful to the end, and pass on this tradition
unblemished.
Many a time in the past there appeared little hope except
that hope to which Mr. Churchill referred, that by standing fast
a time would come when, to quote his own words: "…the tyrant
would make some ghastly mistake which would alter the whole
balance of the struggle."
I sincerely trust, however, that it is not thus our ultimate
unity and freedom will be achieved, though as a younger man
I confess I prayed even for that, and indeed at times saw not
other.
In latter years, I have had a vision of a nobler and better
ending, better for both our people and for the future of mankind.
For that I have now been long working. I regret that it is not to
this nobler purpose that Mr. Churchill is lending his hand rather
than, by the abuse of a people who have done him no wrong,
trying to find in a crisis like the present excuse for continuing
the injustice of the mutilation of our country.
I sincerely hope that Mr. Churchill has not deliberately
chosen the latter course but, if he has, however regretfully we
may say it, we can only say, be it so.
Meanwhile, even as a partitioned small nation, we shall
go on and strive to play our part in the world continuing
unswervingly to work for the cause of true freedom and for
peace and understanding."

From Athol Books
Alsace-Lorraine & The Great Irredentist War
by Brendan Clifford, Roger Casement, Rene Bazin,
Coleman Phillipson, Nicholas Mansergh. 48pp. ISBN 978-1-903497-42-5. ABM No. 34, 2009. €6, £5
Arms Crisis Series by Angela Clifford
The Arms Conspiracy Trial. Ireland 1970: the
Prosecution of Charles Haughey, Capt. Kelly and
Others. 720pp. Index. ISBN 978-1-874157-20-8.
A Belfast Magazine No. 33, 2009. €42, £35
The Arms Crisis: What Was It About? 40 pp. ISBN 978-1-874157-22-6. ABM No. 35. May
2009. €6, £5
Military Aspects Of Ireland's Arms Crisis Of
1969-70. Arms Crisis Series, No. 2. Index. 164pp. ISBN 1 874 157 16 2. A Belfast Magazine No.29. 2006. €14, £11.50
August 1969: Ireland’s Only Appeal To The
United Nations: a cautionary tale of humiliation
and moral collapse. Captain Kelly/Arms Trial
Series, No. 1. ISBN 1 874157 13 8. Index. 96pp. ABM No. 26, March 2006. €8, £6
Speech by Brendan Halligan on Europe (extract)
To celebrate Europe Day on 9 May 2013, the IIEA held the first
lecture in a series to honour the memory of Dr. Garret FitzGerald,
the first President of the Institute, former Taoiseach and Minister
for Foreign Affairs. The theme of this year’s event was ‘Strategies
for a Small State in a Large Union’.
The inaugural lecture in the series was given by Brendan
Halligan, Chairman of the Institute.
B. Halligan explained Ireland’s desire to join Europe and
described the initial difficulties:
“… The obstacles were formidable.
Culturally, politically and economically, Ireland had been
separated from continental Europe for over a century and a half.
Ireland belonged to the anglophone world and had little contact
with the countries conventionally described as “the continent”.
There was little experience of European politics and in a sense
we were the forgotten people of Europe.
But, the problem, as an American diplomat observed at the
time, was that membership of the European Community was
teaching Europeans how to talk to each other. This meant a
country had to know what to say and to have people to say it.
Ireland was ill equipped for this state of constant conversation.
In terms of diplomatic resources, Ireland had a tiny foreign
service, with only twenty-one embassies abroad, Denmark
having twice that number. The Oireachtas had no foreign
affairs committee and little or no expertise in European affairs,
apart from a desultory relationship with the Council of Europe.
Linguistic skills were in short supply for conversing in what
was then a francophone world.
But the most deep seated obstacles arose from the nature of
Ireland itself and consisted of the size, poverty and peripherality
of the country. By any criterion, Ireland was a small country
and if statecraft is the projection of power in international
affairs it is far more difficult if there is little power to project,
either economic or military; more difficult still if the country
is demonstrably poor and geographically peripheral, as Ireland
was.
The intellectual challenge posed by these realities was
to work out a strategy enabling Ireland to overcome its
fundamental weaknesses. Faced with the absence of any vestige
of hard power in terms of population size, economic strength
or military capability, Garret FitzGerald sought to offset that
disadvantage by developing soft power, essentially by making
Ireland politically central, a strategy which also compensated
for being geographically peripheral, and by making it a player
in the big ideas, which compensated for being small. That meant
being relevant to the enterprise as a whole and engaged in its
all its affairs, as well as making a political contribution that was
unique to Ireland but valuable to the Union. It also meant being
willing, and having the capacity, to play on the large stage.
The Foundation
The foundation on which everything rested was Garret
FitzGerald’s recognition from the outset that the new Europe
was a joint enterprise by France and Germany intended to
effect permanent reconciliation between them by replacing a
century and a half of repeated warfare with a permanent peace.
The project was, after all, the brainchild of a Frenchman, Jean
Monnet, and had been publicly launched by another Frenchman,
France’s Foreign Minister, Maurice Schuman, and immediately
accepted by a German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer. In a sense,
all other European countries in the European Union are guests
of the French and Germans. At the time of its formation there
was no compulsion on any country to join the Community and
none now to join the Union.
But if a country elects to join then it does so in the full
knowledge that France and Germany are at the core of the
project and largely determine the pace and direction of its
progress, as well as the manner of its responses to political
and economic challenges as they emerge. The first tenets of
sound statecraft are to recognise the obvious and accept the
inevitable, more difficult that it seems for politicians. Garret
FitzGerald complied with both in recognizing and accepting
France and Germany as the cornerstone of Europe, and did so
without complaint and without trying to undermine their joint
achievements or frustrate their ambitions.
For the Ireland of Garret FitzGerald this meant replacing
London with Paris and Bonn as the centre of Irish foreign
policy.
First Task
In these circumstances, he saw that his immediate task was
“to convince the Germans of our commitment to European
integration and the French of our independence of British
influence”. This was more difficult than it seems in retrospect
as, at the time, very little was known of Ireland in Germany,
apart from Heinrich Boll’s romantic account on his stay in
Achill and John Ford’s film, “The Quiet Man”, while the French
suspected us of being a British satellite, not least because we
spoke English.
Thus, among the many tasks to be accomplished in the
first years of membership, rebranding Ireland was one of the
most urgent because a small state has to establish itself as an
independent actor and positive participant if it is to have any
influence on the policies of a large union. Within the special
world of European diplomacy the rebranding was achieved
almost immediately due largely to Garret FitzGerald’s capacity
to project himself on his interlocutors.
The Germans were impressed with his grasp of economics
and his commitment to removing trade barriers while the
French were enchanted by what he himself called his idiomatic
but ungrammatical command of their language.
On a continuous basis it meant Ireland investing
disproportionate resources in the study of French and German
politics, policy formation, economics, political parties and
personalities so as to have an informed understanding of how
each state functioned and, of vital importance, how the Franco
German alliance worked.
Britain
So, if getting out from under the shadow of Britain was
an immediate task then re-engineering the relationship with
that large neighbour was equally urgent. The relationship
had always been tricky due to the disparity in population and
economic strength and, of course, due to the legacy of history
whereby one party in the relationship felt itself superior to the
other, and behaved accordingly.
But the challenge facing Ireland was managing the shift in the
relationship from the exclusively bi-lateral, and claustrophobic,
to the multi-lateral, and expansive. The character of the
relationship was now changed by virtue of the two countries
sitting as formal equals at the Council table in Brussels but
while it would be absurd to claim it had been turned overnight
into one of political equals a subtle psychological change
had nevertheless taken place. Irish economic prospects were
no longer solely dependent on the goodwill of Whitehall.”

33
What If? ­ —The start of WWII — 9/11
— Paul Craig Roberts
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the
Treasury for Economic Policy and associate editor of
the Wall Street Journal. He was columnist for Business
Week, Scripps Howard News Service, and Creators
Syndicate. He has had many university appointments. He
is frequently to be read on Information Clearing House.
His latest book is The Failure of Laissez Faire Capitalism
and Economic Dissolution of the West.
Without Britain’s guarantee, the German (September
1, 1939) and Soviet (September 17, 1939) invasions of
Poland would have been prevented by the Polish colonels’
acquiescence to Hitler’s demands and would not have
resulted in Britain and France starting World War II by
declaring war on Germany, resulting in the fall of France,
the British driven off the continent, and Roosevelt’s
determination to involve the US in a foreign war unrelated
in any significant way to Americans’ interests.
“What If?” histories are a good read. They are
entertaining, and they provoke thought and encourage
the imagination. How different the world would be if
different judgments, decisions, and circumstances had
prevailed at history’s turning points. Certainly English
history would have been different if King Harold’s soldiers
had obeyed his order not to pursue the defeated fleeing
Normans down the hill. This broke the impenetrable
Saxon shield wall and exposed King Harold to Norman
cavalry. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/
Battle_of_Hastings
Historians write that Hitler’s ambitions were in
the East, not the West. Without the British and French
declaration of war, the war might have been contained,
with the two totalitarian powers fighting it out.
February 21, 2013 Would there ever have been a Soviet Union if the Czar
had stayed out of World War I?
Would there have been a World War II if British,
French, and American politicians had listened to John
Maynard Keynes’ warning that the Treaty of Versailles
would result in a second world war? Germany had been
promised a different outcome—no reparations and no
territorial loss—in exchange for an armistice. As Keynes
realized, the betrayal of the peace led to another great
war.
There are a couple of what ifs that I have been waiting
for historians to explore. As no historians have risen to
the challenge, I will have a go. Keep in mind that a what
if outcome is not necessarily a better outcome. It might
be a worse outcome. As ‘what if’ did not happen and
there is no ‘what if’ history, there is no way of making a
judgment.
Suppose Churchill had not succeeded in pressuring
Chamberlain to interfere with Hitler’s negotiations with
the Polish colonels by issuing a British guarantee to
Poland in the event of German aggression. Would World
War II have resulted or would it have been a different
war?
The British guarantee emboldened the colonels
and frustrated Hitler’s attempt to restore
a Germany
dismantled by the Versailles Treaty. The result was
Hitler’s secret pact with Stalin to divide up Poland,
technically known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
Having given the guarantee, Britain was honor-bound
to declare war on Germany (fortunately not also on the
Soviet Union), which pulled in France because of the
British-French alliance against Germany.
34
Alternatively, Hitler and Stalin might have continued
their cooperation and together seized the oil rich Middle
East. The British, French, and Americans would have
been a poor match for the German and Soviet militaries.
General Patton, the best American commander, thought
he could take on the Red Army that had crushed the
Wehrmacht, but his hubris did not worry Red Army
commanders, who defeated the bulk of the German
Army, which was deployed on the Eastern Front, while
the Americans, aided by German motorized units running
out of fuel, struggled to contain a small part of German
forces in the Battle of the Bulge. Today we would be
buying our oil from a German/Soviet consortium.
This outcome implies a different history for the
Middle East, and so does another what if. What if
the 9/11 Commission consisted of experts instead of
politicians with their fingers in the wind, and what if the
commissioners had too much integrity to write a report
dictated by the executive branch? The unlikely and
untenable failure of every institution of the American
national security state would have been investigated, and
the collapse of WTC 7 at free fall speed would have had
to have been acknowledged in the report and explained.
A totally different story would have emerged, a story
unlikely to have locked Americans into permanent war
in an expanding number of countries and into a domestic
police state.
Americans might still be a free people. And American
liberty might still be a beacon to the world.
On the other hand, a finding of government complicity
in 9/11 could have threatened powerful interests and
resulted in violent conflict and martial law.
What ifs are provocative, and that is what makes them
fun. Thinking is America’s national disability. I’m all for
anything that provokes Americans to think.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2013/02/21/what-if-paulcraig-roberts/

Irish soldiers Deployed Abroad Today –
This is a list of places where Irish soldiers are deployed
today; further information can be obtained from the Irish
Defence Forces website http://www.military.ie/overseas/
current-missions.
Edward Horgan writes:
These missions can be UN, EU or NATO; the Mali mission
will be an EU mission. Irish troops previously served in
a mission to Chad which began as an EU Mission and then
ended as a UN mission. Any mission involving France in Africa
will most likely be a neo-colonial mission in French national
interests rather than a genuine peacekeeping mission.
In September 1997 a UNSC Resolution 1199 highlighted
an impending human catastrophe in Kosovo and demanded a
ceasefire. In June 1999 Serbia agreed to the G8 Peace Principles
and began to withdraw its forces. NATO ended its air strikes
and KFOR, which was authorised by UNSCR 1244, entered
Kosovo.
Middle East
Current Missions
UNTSO - 18 December 1958 to date UN Mission
UNTSO, established in 1948, is the oldest ongoing United
Nations peacekeeping operation. It operates in Syria, Jordan,
Lebanon and Israel - the parties to the Truce Agreements that
followed the fighting in Palestine in 1948.
Currently the Defence Forces are involved in a number of
missions throughout the world involving approximately one
hundred Personnel from all branches. This number will change
to include the 440 personnel who will be involved with the
new mission to Lebanon which was confirmed at that time by
Minister for Defence.
UNIFIL - May 1978 - to date UN Mission
Following the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978, the United
Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) was established
to supervise the withdrawal of Israeli forces and restore peace
and security to the area. In June 2011 an infantry battalion was
deployed back to Lebanon.
Africa
UNNY 27 - November 1978 - to date UN Mission
Since 1978, a number of Defence Forces officers have served
in different positions at United Nations Headquarters New York
(UNNY). At present the Defence Forces provide two officers to
the UN's Department of Peace Keeping Operations (DPKO).
MINURSO - September 1991 - to date, UN Mission
The deployment of MINURSO stems from a dispute over
the former Spanish Sahara, situated on the north-west African
coast, between Morocco, Algeria, Mauritania and the Atlantic
Ocean.
MONUC - June 2001 to date UN Mission
The Democratic Republic of Congo and five regional
states signed the Lusaka Ceasefire Agreement in July 1999.
In response the UN Security Council passed Resolution 1279,
which included the establishment of United Nations Observer
Mission in Congo (MONUC).
EUTM - April 2010 to date
On 25 January 2010, the Council agreed to set up a military
mission, European Union Training Mission Somalia (EUTM),
to contribute to training of Somali security forces.
Asia
ISAF - December 2001 to date, NATO Mission
On December 5th, 2001 the Bonn Agreement was signed
by leading Afghan political figures and representatives of
the leading world powers. Resulting from this agreement an
international force, ISAF, was established to secure peace and
stability in Afghanistan.
Europe
EUFOR/SFOR - May 1997 - to date;
EUFOR IS EU Mission and SFOR is NATO Mission
Under UNSCR 1031 NATO was given the mandate to
implement the military aspects of the Dayton Peace Agreements
following the end of the war in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1995.
As a result IFOR (Implementation Force) was deployed and
completed its mission by December 1996 and was subsequently
replaced by SFOR.
KFOR - August 1999 to date, NATO Mission
Visit
the
official
DPKO
site
<http://www.un.org/en/
peacekeeping/about/dpko/>
Mali and Afghanistan.
Since Irish soliders are deployed in Mali, it is interesting
to compare the Malian situation regarding mining resources
with that of Afghanistan. Both have an abundance of natural
resources:
“ The UK is to fund a £10m programme to help Afghanistan
exploit its huge natural resources, the prime minister has
revealed.
Estimates of what lies underground in Afghanistan range from
$1-3tn worth of gold, gems, iron ore, and oil and gas.
David Cameron announced the three-year funding to support
the Afghan Ministry of Mines at an event at Downing Street.
There have been claims that the award of mining contracts
after the fall of the Taliban was affected by corruption.
The award of a 30-year contract to a Chinese consortium to
exploit the Aynak copper mine in Logar province came under
particular criticism.
The Afghan Minister of Mines, Wahidullah Shahrani, who has
been in his post for three years, has criticised the way things
were done in the past.
He welcomed the new support, saying what Afghanistan
needed was “sustainable development for its people in the long
term.”
He said Afghanistan would not want to repeat the experience
of many other post-conflict countries, particularly in Africa,
where large resources proved to be a curse.” BBC 13.3.13.
35
Oil basin
Taoudenni basin
Manganese
Mn
Pétrolplus
Phosphate
U
ALGERIA
Taoudenni
Diamonds and
precious stones
Sonatrach
ENI
Uranium
Oklo
Uranium Limited
Gold
BX
Bauxite
Fe
Iron ore
Mn
Country who has signed an
exploitation agreement with
avec le Mali.
Tonbidi
Timbuktu
MAURITANIA
Mn
Gourma
basin
Graben of Nara
U
Gao
U
Adrar of
Ifoghas
Kidal
Tamesna
basin
Tilemsi
Samit
Graben of Gao
Nioro
Yatela
SENEGAL
Kayes
Sadiola
Loulo
Kofi
BX
Gounkoto
Kodieran
Bafoulabe
Fe
Kita
BX
TabakotoMn
Fe
U
Mopti
Resolute
mining Limited
Bamako
Rockgate
GUINEA
Hombori
Tassiga
NIGER
Segou
BURKINA FASO
Syama
Kobada
Bafing
and Makana
Banankoro
Falea
Mn
Douentza
Nampala
Bougouni
Kalana
Morila
Sikasso
BENIN
IVORY COAST
GHANA
TOGO
Who exploits Mali’s resources?
E. Horgan says that when the French are involved militarily
in an African country it is for selfish interested motives;
nevertheless, the resources of Mali are exploited by a variety of
rich countries rather than France.
Gold concessions are as follows: (the name of the place
where the mine is situated is in bold; these mines are nearly all
situated on the Southern border of Mali)
Gounkoto and Loulo, Rand Gold Resources, United
Kingdom;
Kalana, Avnel Gold Mining, Guernsey; [mine previously
exploited by Mali with Russian help; see firm’s website:
“The Kalana Mine and Permit was historically owned by a
Malian State company (Sogemork) with exploration and mine
construction supported by Russian financial and technical aid.
The mine operated for a few years until it was put on care and
maintenance on the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991. The
Kalana Mine and Permit was privatized by international tender
and awarded to Avnel in December 2002.”
Kodiéran, Wassoul’or (Mali) 55% and Pearl Gold AG
(Germany) 25%), (Wassoul’or is mainly capital from UAE and
Qatar according to Prospective Africaine)
Morila, Anglogold Ashanti, South Africa (40%) and Randgold
Resources, United Kingdom (40%) ;
36
Sadiola, Anglogold Ashanti (41%) and IAM Gold, Canada
(41%);
Segala Tabakoto, Endeavour Mining, Canada;
Syama, Resolute Mining, Australia;
Yatela, Anglogold Ashanti, South Africa (40%) and IAM Gold,
Canada (40%).
The Malian state owns a 20% share in each mine (except in
Sadiola where its share is limited to 18%).
Oil is exploited by
- in the North: Australia, Mauritania, Italy, Algeria, Mali
Angola, Angola with China, India/Mauritius, Maliasia, USA,
Nigeria.
- in the South: France and UK (under cover of Bermuda and
Switzerland), Canada with Mali, China with Macau.
Total is not present in Mali as an exploiter of oil, only as a
distributor; it is present in the Mauritanian side of the oil field.
This information and the map on this page come from
‘African Prospective’ a group based in France · The Newsletter
· Information and Analysis on the African Continent · Special
issue no 1-1 · 12 February 2013 is available at:
www.prospectiveafricaine.com/abo
versions available.)
(French and English